Our Team
Meet the dedicated researchers and students of BASE Lab
Lab Director
Dr. Khaled Ahmed
Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director
Khaled Ahmed is currently an associate professor and graduate program director in the School of Computing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Technology at King Faisal University. Moreover, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has over 19 years of experience in academia, research, and industry.
Dr. Ahmed has a prolific publication record, including 69 articles in journals and conference proceedings, and he has edited four books on Peer-to-Peer networks, Wireless Sensor Networks, and advances in Big Data, Blockchain, and Deep Learning. He has acted as Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI in about 11 funded research projects. Currently, he is PI and Co-PI on three federal/state research funds.
His current research focuses on the areas of Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Big Data, and real-time video analysis for safety applications.
PhD Students
Toqi Tahamid Sarker
PhD Student
Taminul Islam
PhD Student
Taminul is developing lightweight, real-time vision transformers and VLMs for semantic segmentation, multimodal fusion, and multi-task learning, applied to optical gas imaging of livestock emissions, thermal sensing, and precision agriculture at the edge.
Research Interests:
Joseph Kalinzi
PhD Student
Joseph is designing AI avatars with context-aware dialogue generation, natural voice interactions, emotion and facial expression recognition and synthesis, and adaptive behavior through reinforcement learning.
Research Interests:
Abdellah Lakhssassi
PhD Student
Alumni
Nishanth Sagar Panthangi
Masters 2024
Manoj Aluri
Masters 2024
Thesis: Porosity prediction and estimation in metal additive manufactured parts using deep learning
Current: Researcher in Material Science
Paloju Sathish Kumar
Masters 2024
Thesis: Simulating federated learning in autonomous driving environments
Current: Researcher in Autonomous Driving
Yousef Alsenani
PhD 2020
Thesis: Trust and Reliability-based frameworks for Secure Volunteer Cloud Computing
Current: Researcher in Cloud Computing Security
Majid Memari
PhD 2023
Thesis: Comparative Analysis of VAE and GAN for Image Generation to Improve OCR System
Current: AI Researcher
Sandeep Goshika
MS 2023
Thesis: Using Deep learning to detect defects in soybean leaf
Current: Machine Learning Engineer in AgriTech
Abeer M. Almalky
MS 2023
Thesis: Developing deep learning CNN for Weed growth detection
Current: AI Researcher in Agriculture
Awards:
Jawad Siddique
MS 2022
Thesis: Using Deep learning to mitigate animal-vehicle accidents
Current: Data Scientist
Subash Kharel
MS 2021
Thesis: Detecting Potholes using deep learning
Current: Computer Vision Engineer
Awards:
Akhila Kambhatla
MS 2020
Thesis: Handgun detection in drone stream video using deep learning
Current: Completed PhD at BASE Lab (2026)