Ph.D. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Joined Summer 2021
- M.Eng., Electrical Engineering, Iowa State University, 2024
- B.S., Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Zahid is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He joined Dr. Sarkar's lab in Summer 2021. His research interests include human-centric AI in autonomous systems, computer vision and multimodal learning, generative-AI-based multi-agent workflows, and efficient fine-tuning of AI foundation models. He has worked on deep learning and computer vision for intelligent driving applications, and since March 2026 he has been an Agentic AI Research Intern at Corteva Agriscience. His hobbies include cycling, soccer, table tennis, hiking, and photography.
Research interests: Human-centric AI in autonomous systems, computer vision, multimodal learning, multi-agent generative AI, foundation-model fine-tuning
Publications with the lab (9)
- Bidirectional linear recurrent models for sequence-level multisource fusion — Information Fusion (2026)
- Driving as a screening aid: Scenario-based cognitive assessment in older drivers from driving video — Artificial Intelligence for Transportation (2026)
- RLS3: RL-Based Synthetic Sample Selection to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Indoor Autonomous Perception — Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Cyber-Physical … (2025)
Show all 9
- Classifying Cognitive Decline in Older Drivers from Behavior on Adverse Roads Detected Using Computer Vision — Journal of Transportation Technologies (2025)
- FUSE: First-Order and Second-Order Unified Synthesis in Stochastic Optimization — 2025 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) (2025)
- GENESIS-RL: GEnerating natural edge-cases with systematic integration of safety considerations and reinforcement learning — 2024 IEEE International Automated Vehicle Validation Conference (IAVVC) (2024)
- Biotrove: A large curated image dataset enabling ai for biodiversity — Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2024)
- Roadway weather challenges illuminate real‐world driving biomarkers of dementia risk — Alzheimer's & Dementia (2023)
- Vision-Language Models can Identify Distracted Driver Behavior from Naturalistic Videos — IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2024)
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