Vinayak Pillai
Today, we are having a discussion with Dr. Dinesh Yadav, who serves as the Dean of the Training and Placement Office and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at St. Andrews Institute of Technology & Management, Gurugram, Haryana, India. In this conversation, we will explore some of the latest significant innovations shaping the field of Data Analytics and the impact Mr. Vinayak Pillai is creating with his work.
Dr. Dinesh Yadav, we appreciate you talking with us today. We are excited to talk about Mr. Vinayak Pillai's major contributions to the data analytics sector.
Q: Professor Yadav, thank you for joining us. You've recently integrated with Mr. Vinayak Pillai's open-access book "Anomaly Detection for Innovators: Transforming Data into Breakthroughs" into both your research and your courses. Can you tell us how you came across the book?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: Absolutely. I first encountered Mr. Pillai's book during a faculty research seminar around October 2022. A colleague in applied data-science recommended it, noting its real-world examples and accessibility. I skimmed through a few chapters online and quickly realized it was something innovative, practical, deeply informed, and highly relevant to both students and researchers.
Q: What stood out to you as most valuable from a curriculum development standpoint?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: The book bridges theory and application seamlessly. For my "Data-Driven Decision Making" course, it provided not just technical concepts but a strategic framework with respect to how data can influence real outcomes in financial and insurance industries. Students loved the fact that case studies were drawn from diverse real-time data scenarios with detailed formulations for education and research and that it included ethical considerations too. The open-access format was the icing on the cake. Everyone had equal access from day one, no barriers.
Q: That's really awesome. Could you please share an example as to how the book supported student research or faculty research initiatives?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: In many ways, for the students in my university, the book till now acts as both a learning guide and a reference manual. I've supervised several capstone and independent research projects, where students used datasets from publicly sourced financial data and applied the techniques directly from the book. They were able to clean, analyze, and interpret data and identify anomalies at different stages of the dataflow using the data-frameworks and anomaly detection techniques which Mr. Pillai introduced. I would like to go a little further in detail and share an example from our faculty-research project conducted last year, around July 2024. My project goal was to lead and assist the students from the Computer Science Engineering (CSE) Department to build intelligent Data analysis models for anomaly detection. This is where Mr. Pillai's book extensively helped in building a thorough end-to-end data-architecture using chapter 2 of the book titled "Creating Data Models for Effective Anomaly Detection". We used the highly useful process-flow mentioned in page 29 of the book. Our entire Anomaly detection mechanism was backed by Mahalanobis distance calculation which was used to measure the degree of similarity between data and mean of a multivariate dataset. The entire process is mentioned accurately in page 31 of the book, and it was this process that was the significant breakthrough my project got where-in the students could build highly efficient Anomaly detection models with efficiencies reaching up to 95% in terms of anomaly detection using extensive data analysis.
Q: And from a research perspective how far did Mr. Pillai's novel book prove its significance?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: Mr. Pillai's open-access innovation book was profoundly revolutionary and exceptionally productive. I am now engaged in a project focused on data anomaly detection for efficient IoT (Internet of Things) decision-making, and one of the approaches presented in Chapter 4, entitled "Transforming Anomalies into Innovation and Strategic Advantage," was particularly relevant. We modified that framework and developed a prototype model related to efficient IoT data-driven decision-making. Mr. Pillai's book uniquely influences the data architecture of an active research model. I wish to announce that my research team and I have recently published a paper titled "Recent Developments in IoT Security and Privacy: A Review of Best Practices with Challenges and Emerging Solutions", on an international reputed platform in which we utilized Mr. Pillai's open-access book and Indian utility patent for sustainable innovations in anomaly detection using data-analytics.
Q: That's impressive. Would you say the book filled a gap in the current academic resources available?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: Yes Undoubtedly. Many analytics textbooks are either too theoretical or overly simplistic for graduate-level study. Mr. Pillai's book offers a distinctive equilibrium, firmly rooted in contemporary data analysis trends, articulated in a manner that encourages inquiry and experimentation. I have endorsed it across several divisions, from business to data research.
Q: Do you plan to continue using it in your programs going forward?
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: Absolutely. In fact, we're working extensively on our IoT data-decision making-related coursework and this book would be the foundational text.
Q: Thank you, Professor Yadav. It's exciting to see how scholarships can ripple through classrooms and research labs alike.
Dr. Dinesh Yadav: Thank you, it's even more exciting when those ripples are freely accessible and widely impactful.
