Doctoral Research Fellowship

The School of Computing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale is proud to recognize three doctoral students—Toqi Tahamid Sarker, Abdellah Lakhssassi, and Taminul Islam—for receiving prestigious Graduate School fellowships that support advanced research and innovation.

These awards highlight the strength of graduate research within the School of Computing, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data-driven systems with real-world impact.

Toqi Tahamid Sarker

Toqi Tahamid Sarker has been awarded the Dissertation Research Assistant Award for 2026–2027 and is currently completing the Doctoral Research Fellowship for 2025–2026.

Sarker’s research focuses on efficient and multimodal deep learning for computer vision, with a primary emphasis on optical gas imaging for monitoring methane emissions. His work aims to develop scalable, automated systems capable of detecting and quantifying emissions in real time. By designing lightweight vision transformers and semantic segmentation architectures, he improves model accuracy while reducing computational cost, enabling deployment on resource-constrained devices in field environments.

In addition, Sarker develops vision-language models that combine image and text inputs, allowing systems to locate and describe gas plumes in more flexible and interpretable ways. Since beginning his doctoral studies in 2023, he has authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers, with publications appearing at leading venues such as CVPR, ICCV, and WACV, as well as journals including Scientific Reports and IET Image Processing.

“Toqi has demonstrated outstanding research achievements in multimodal deep learning and computer vision, with a focus on optical gas imaging for methane emission monitoring. He successfully defended and passed his dissertation proposal and is currently conducting dissertation research on grounded vision-language models with a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) backbone for Optical Gas Imaging. His strong publication record in top-tier venues reflects his excellence and potential as an emerging researcher.”
— Dr. Khaled Ahmed
    Associate Professor, School of Computing

Abdellah Lakhssassi

Abdellah Lakhssassi has been awarded the
Doctoral Research Fellowship: 2026–2027.

Lakhssassi is a doctoral student in Computer Science and a Graduate Research Assistant in the BASE Lab. His research applies computer vision and deep learning to plant phenotyping, developing models that enable plant scientists and breeders to evaluate crops more efficiently and objectively. He works across the full research pipeline, from data collection and labeling to model development, emphasizing the importance of high-quality datasets in machine learning.

Beyond his core work, Lakhssassi is actively exploring emerging areas of artificial intelligence, including 3D reconstruction, diffusion models, vision-language models, and agentic AI. His academic interests also extend to optimization algorithms, problem solving, and game-playing AI.

“What distinguishes Abdellah is his ability to pair technical excellence with practical impact, taking ownership of every stage of a project from growing the crops to building the models, and consistently publishing in competitive venues.”
— Dr. Khaled Ahmed
    Associate Professor, School of Computing

Taminul Islam

Taminul Islam has been awarded the
Doctoral Research Fellowship: 2026–2027.

Islam is a Research Assistant in the BASE Lab under the supervision of Dr. Khaled R. Ahmed. His research focuses on efficient vision transformers, vision-language models, video object segmentation, thermal imaging, and multimodal fusion, with applications in sustainable AI and precision agriculture.

His work has been published in leading journals and conferences, including Nature Scientific Reports, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, CVPR, WACV, ICCV, IEEE Big Data, ICMLA, and ISVC. One of his publications was recognized as a Highly Cited Paper for 2024–2025. In addition to his research achievements, Islam placed third at the Falling Walls Lab Illinois 2025 competition.

“Taminul has emerged as a natural leader within our lab, and he works collaboratively with his teammates in our research lab. His commitment to mentorship is equally impressive.”
— Dr. Khaled Ahmed
    Associate Professor, School of Computing

Advancing Research with Real-World Impact

Together, these students represent the depth and diversity of research in the School of Computing, advancing innovative solutions in environmental monitoring, agriculture, and intelligent systems. Their work reflects SIU’s commitment to supporting high-impact research that addresses real-world challenges.