Lab updates
News
- Paper accepted
WeedNet published in Nature Communications
A foundation model for global-to-local weed species identification, trained on 14 million images spanning 1,593 species.
- Talk or keynote
CVPR 2026: panel and workshop talk
Prof. Sarkar joined a panel with Gary Bradski, Jason Corso, Girish Chowdhary and Shenlong Wang and presented agentic visual reasoning for agriculture at the Vision for Agriculture workshop; Tirtho Roy presented SAGE at the DataMFM workshop.
- Other
Dr. Homagni Saha joins IIT Kharagpur
Lab alumnus Dr. Homagni Saha joins the faculty of IIT Kharagpur.
- Paper accepted
AgGym released
A modular, open-source Gym environment that simulates biotic stress spread and yield loss to evaluate crop-management strategies, including reinforcement learning.
- New grant
DARPA Ag × BTO selection
An Iowa State team led by Prof. Sarkar was selected under the DARPA Ag × BTO program to build an early-warning system for biological threats to U.S. agriculture.
- Thesis defense / graduation
Two new Ph.D.s
Dr. Ashutosh Nirala and Dr. Ibne Farabi Shihab were hooded at the December 2025 commencement.
- Paper accepted
ICCPS 2025 paper presented
Joshua Waite presented work using a reinforcement-learning agent to generate synthetic data that improves the spatial reasoning of vision-language models.
- Award
Prof. Sarkar receives the PECASE
Soumik Sarkar received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, nominated by NSF.
- Event
MLCAS 2024
The Sixth International Workshop on Machine Learning for Cyber-Agricultural Systems drew 150+ attendees, six invited speakers and 30+ contributed talks and posters.