KDDM Lab - UAB

🎉 Congratulations, Dr. Shahariar Rabby! 🎉

We are thrilled to announce that Shahariar has officially completed his PhD! 🎓

His dissertation, "Efficient Thin Structure Segmentation via Edge, Directional, and Topology-Preserving Priors," focuses on a major challenge in computer vision: teaching AI to accurately map out complex, continuous thin and elongated structures. He successfully achieved state-of-the-art accuracy while drastically reducing computational costs, creating models so efficient they can run in real-time on lightweight devices like a Raspberry Pi!

Join us at the Knowledge, Discovery, and Data Mining (KDDM) Research Lab in celebrating Dr. Rabby's hard work, innovation, and massive contributions to our team.

Great news!
Our lab member Abujar Sheikh, just had his paper, "Predicting BK Nephropathy Using Comprehensive Transplant-to-Biopsy Non-invasive Clinical Features," accepted for an Oral Presentation at the upcoming AI in Nephrology Conference at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)!

In recognition of the technical impact of his predictive modeling work, Sheikh has also been awarded a competitive Travel Grant.

This achievement highlights the KDDM Lab's focus on robust AI architectures. While we celebrate this milestone, the team remains focused on finalizing several advanced manuscripts for submission to top-tier AI and CS venues.

Congratulations, Sheikh!

Join us in congratulating our Ph.D. candidate, Shahariar Rabby, on being named the CS Outstanding PhD Student for 2026 at UAB! 🏆🎉

This is a well-deserved recognition of his strong research efforts and dedication to our lab. We are incredibly proud of your hard work, Shahariar! 👏🔬

🎉 Congratulations to Fei Zhao on Successfully Defending the PhD Dissertation!

We are pleased to share that Fei Zhao successfully defended the PhD dissertation “Efficient Multimodal Foundation Model Tuning for Hallucination Mitigation” on November 14, 2025.
This work makes significant contributions to multimodal learning and hallucination mitigation in vision-language models.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Zhao on this milestone!

We are thrilled to share that our PhD candidate Fei Zhao has been honored with the prestigious 2025 UAB College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award. This distinguished recognition celebrates Fei’s outstanding academic achievements, groundbreaking research contributions, and unwavering dedication to excellence.

Fei’s success reflects not only personal effort and talent but also the collaborative spirit of our lab, department, and the broader UAB community. We are proud to see such exemplary work being acknowledged at a college-wide level.

Please join us in congratulating Fei Zhao on this remarkable accomplishment, and in wishing continued success in future endeavors!

Congratulations to Shahariar Rabby on successfully passing his Level 2 exam! 🚀👏

We are thrilled to share that our PhD student, Saha Pratim, has had his manuscript, titled "CT Radiomics Features Predict Change in Lung Density and Rate of Emphysema Progression," accepted for publication in the prestigious Annals of the American Thoracic Society (AnnalsATS)!

Please join us in congratulating Pratim on this incredible achievement!

We are excited to share that our PhD student, Fei Zhao, has been awarded the 2024 UAB National Alumni Society Graduate School and Global Affairs Dean's Scholarship!

This is an impressive achievement, and we are proud of Fei's dedication and hard work. Join us in congratulating Fei on this outstanding accomplishment! 🎉👏

We're excited to share that our PhD student, Fei Zhao, has received the CIKM 2024 NSF Travel Award. Fei will present his novel work, 'CheckGuard: Advancing Stolen Check Detection with a Cross-Modal Image-Text Benchmark Dataset,' at CIKM 2024. This work utilizes multimodal large language models to enhance information extraction and fraud detection in check images.

This award not only facilitates Fei's participation at this top-tier conference but also highlights the importance of his research in advancing technological solutions in information and knowledge extraction.

Congratulations, Fei!

Excited to share that KDDM lab student Shahariar Rabby showcased our COPDxNet research at ATS 2024! Our AI model improves COPD detection from chest CT scans, leading to quicker diagnoses and better patient care. Proud of our team's effort in advancing respiratory health!

🌟 Exciting News!🌟 Our paper has been accepted for publication in the prestigious ACM Computing Surveys (Impact Factor: 16.6).

Title: Deep Multimodal Data Fusion
· Fei Zhao, Chengcui Zhang, Baocheng Geng