Prof Rajeev Kumar, who taught at the School of Computer and Systems Sciences accuses one Om Prakash, his former PhD mentee of stealing his research and reproducing it in an independent paper. This paper, titled Detection of Fake Accounts on Social Media Using Multimodal Data With Deep Learning was published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Computational Social Systems journal (IEEE or IEEE TCSS) on August 7, 2023. Interestingly, seven other academics besides Om Prakash were listed as the paper’s authors – two of whom are from international universities.
Prof Kumar said that he immediately reached out to Om Prakash on August 14, 2023, when he found out about the paper. Following this, Om Prakash admitted his guilt and expressed his commitment to rebuilding trust. Prof Rohit Sharma, another academic mentioned in the paper as its author, also reached out to Prof Kumar, assuring him that the process to withdraw the paper from the IEEE TSCS journal was initiated. Soon enough, on August 23, 2023, IEEE informed that the paper had been withdrawn. However, the paper was still available on the IEEE Xplore digital library, the research database of the journal.
