Iowa State University
Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory
Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory (SCSLab), Iowa State University, led by Prof. Soumik Sarkar.
Machine learning for autonomous perception and decision-making in complex cyber-physical systems.
About Us
In our research group, we develop new machine learning algorithms for autonomous perception and decision-making in complex cyber-physical systems with emphasis on decision frameworks, information fusion, distributed learning and control, multi-agent systems, safety and robustness of learning-enabled cyber-physical systems. Our application areas of interest include complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) frameworks for (a) materials, design, and manufacturing, (b) food, energy, and sustainability, (c) biology, health and quality of life, and (d) autonomy and smart infrastructure. The nature of our research is inherently multi-disciplinary involving machine learning, dynamical systems, information theory, theory of computation, topology and statistical mechanics.
Dr. Soumik Sarkar serves as the
- Director of the Translational AI Center (TrAC) at Iowa State
- Associate Director of the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA)
- Lead PI for the NSF Cyber-Physical Systems Frontier project COALESCE
- Faculty-in-charge for the Cyber-Physical Systems minor at Iowa State
Latest news
All news →- Paper acceptedWeedNet published in Nature CommunicationsOct 2026
- Talk or keynoteCVPR 2026: panel and workshop talkJun 2026
- OtherDr. Homagni Saha joins IIT KharagpurApr 2026
- Paper acceptedAgGym releasedFeb 2026
Featured publications
All publications →- Nature Communications · 2026WeedNet: a foundation model-based global-to-local AI approach for weed species identification and classification
Yanben Shen, Timilehin T. Ayanlade, Venkata Naresh Boddepalli, et al.
- IEEE TNNLS · 2026Enhancing PPO With Trajectory-Aware Hybrid Policies
Qisai Liu, Zhanhong Jiang, Hsin-Jung Yang, et al.
- CVPR 2026 Workshop · 2026SAGE: Scalable Agentic Grounded Evaluation for Crop Disease Diagnosis
Muhammad Arshad, Tirtho Roy, Yanben Shen, et al.
- ICRA 2026 · 2026Find the Fruit: Designing a Zero-Shot Sim2Real Deep RL Planner for Occlusion Aware Plant Manipulation
Nitesh Subedi, Hsin-Jung Yang, Devesh K Jha, Soumik Sarkar
- AISTATS 2026 · 2026Directional Concentration Uncertainty: A Representational Approach to Uncertainty Quantification for Generative Models
Souradeep Chattopadhyay, Kennedy, Brendan, Sai Munikoti, et al.
- ICLR 2025 · 2025Latent Safety-Constrained Policy Approach for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning
Prajwal Koirala, Zhanhong Jiang, Soumik Sarkar, Cody Fleming
- CVPR 2025 · 2025SC-NeRF: NeRF-based Point Cloud Reconstruction using a Stationary Camera for Agricultural Applications
Kibon Ku, Talukder Z Jubery, Elijah Rodriguez, et al.
- WACV 2025 · 2025Leveraging vision language models for specialized agricultural tasks
Muhammad Arbab Arshad, Talukder Zaki Jubery, Tirtho Roy, et al.
- PNAS Nexus · 2025InsectNet: Real-time identification of insects using an end-to-end machine learning pipeline
Shivani Chiranjeevi, Mojdeh Saadati, Zi K Deng, et al.
- Communications Engineering · 2025Benchmarking scientific machine-learning approaches for flow prediction around complex geometries
Ali Rabeh, Ethan Herron, Aditya Balu, et al.
- Trends in Plant Science · 2025Digital twins for the plant sciences
Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Soumik Sarkar, Arti Singh, Asheesh K. Singh
- NeurIPS 2024 · 2024BioTrove: A Large Curated Image Dataset Enabling AI for Biodiversity
Chih-Hsuan Yang, Benjamin Feuer, Talukder Jubery, et al.
- CVPR 2024 · 2024DIMAT: Decentralized Iterative Merging-and-Training for Deep Learning Models
Nastaran Saadati, Minh Pham, Nasla Saleem, et al.
- Trends in Plant Science · 2024Cyber-agricultural systems for crop breeding and sustainable production
Soumik Sarkar, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Arti Singh, et al.
Sponsors
- Regents
Innovation
Funds