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.

Contact Website

PhD Students

Akhila Kambhatla

PhD Student

Akhila is researching real-time automatic handgun detection in drone stream video using deep learning.

Research Interests:

•Computer Vision

•Deep Learning

•Swarm Intelligence

•Natural Language Processing

Toqi Tahamid Sarker

PhD Student

Toqi is developing deep learning techniques for detecting methane gas in livestock.

Research Interests:

•Semantic Segmentation

•Low-level Vision

•Multi-modal Language Model

Taminul Islam

PhD Student

Taminul is working on artificial intelligence for detecting Acidosis disease in livestock.

Research Interests:

•Computer Vision

•Object Detection and Segmentation

•Deep Learning

•Disease Detection

Laya Karimi Chahrogh

PhD Student

Laya is exploring federated learning techniques for autonomous driving.

Research Interests:

•Federated Learning

•Autonomous Driving

•Distributed AI

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:

•Large Language Models

•Computer Vision

•Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

•Human-Computer Interaction

Abdellah Lakhssassi

PhD Student

Abdellah is working on Precision Agriculture, or the use of Artificial Intelligence to Detect and Estimate Plant Stress.

Research Interests:

•Computer Vision

•Deep Learning

•AI in Video Games

•Genetic Algorithms

Master's Students

James Antwi Adinkrah

Masters Student

James is working on Artificial Intelligent model for speech recognition tailored for medical assistant application.

Research Interests:

•Large Language Models

•Computer Vision

•Deep Learning

Alumni

Nishanth Sagar Panthangi

Masters 2024

Thesis: Federated Learning for Portfolio Optimization

Current: Software Development Engineer - II at Amazon

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:

•Outstanding Thesis Award

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:

•Outstanding Thesis Award

Akhila Kambhatla

MS 2020

Thesis: Handgun detection in drone stream video using deep learning

Current: PhD Student at BASE Lab