Multimodal perception
Computer vision and sensor fusion (thermal, optical, acoustic, electrical) for in-process quality monitoring.
🎓 Ph.D. Researcher · Louisiana State University
MD Shafikul Islam
Building Physical AI for manufacturing: machines that sense, predict, and correct themselves in real time.
I am a Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering at Louisiana State University and a Graduate Research Assistant in the AnalyticsIQ Lab. My research connects in-situ monitoring, digital twins, and optimal control for metal additive manufacturing (WAAM, DED, and LPBF), and I recently completed my M.S. in Industrial Engineering (August 2026). My current work extends to robotics for manufacturing.
🔬 Research focus
Four pillars of my work
Metal additive manufacturing can print complex parts, but it still struggles to detect process changes and correct defects during fabrication. I work on the full loop, from sensing to action.
Learned dynamics and digital twins
Physics-informed and data-driven models that connect process data to part quality.
Predictive control and safe autonomy
Model predictive control that selects corrective actions within machine and safety limits.
Edge deployment
Real-time inference on NVIDIA Jetson with TensorRT, close to the machine.
📰 Updates
Selected news
Papers, awards, talks, and milestones. Scroll inside the box for older items.
- Aug 14, 2026🎓 milestoneEarned the M.S. in Industrial Engineering (thesis option) at LSU. Thesis: Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence for Real-Time Quality Assurance in Additive Manufacturing.
- Jul 11, 2026📄 paperInvariantBench: Can Large Language Models Exhibit Inherent Reasoning Across Equivalent Transformations? presented as a poster at the 3rd AI for Math Workshop, ICML 2026.
- Jun 26, 2026🎤 talkPresented the poster Entropy-Aware Model Predictive Control for Transient Quality Mitigation in Metal Additive Manufacturing at the LSU Control Systems Symposium (doi: 10.31390/lsucontrol.26.12).
- Jun 2026🎤 talkPresented three works (healthcare, data analytics, and AI) at the IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2026.
- Jun 2026🏆 award2nd Place, Best Track Paper Award (Health Systems Track), IISE Annual Conference 2026, for Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Automated and Explainable Postoperative Complication Risk Stratification.
- Jun 2026🏆 award3rd Place, IISE DAIS Student Data Analytics Competition, IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2026.
- Apr 2026🤝 serviceServed as a judge for the Louisiana Science and Engineering Fair, Senior Division.
- Apr 2026📄 paperFeature-aware anisotropic local differential privacy paper for metal AM is under major revision at ASME JCISE; preprint posted (arXiv:2604.05077).
- 2026📄 paperNew journal papers in the International Journal of Production Research, Digital Twins and Applications, IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, and the International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management.
- Dec 16, 2025🎤 talkAll three IISE submissions (healthcare, data analytics, and AI) were accepted for oral presentation at IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2026.
- Nov 29, 2025📄 paperPaper “Fracture Finder: Computer-Aided Real-Time Diagnosis of Vertebral Fractures in Thoracic Spine X-Rays Using YOLOv8 with Weighted Box Fusion and Augmentation Strategies” accepted in IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering.
- Nov 2025📄 paperPaper “Interpretable Forecasting of Dissolved Oxygen Leveraging Foundation Model for Proactive Aeration in Rural Wastewater Treatment Systems” published in Water Research (2025).
- Oct 25, 2025🏆 awardRunner-up, Stakeholder Engagement Data Challenge at INFORMS Annual Meeting 2025, for large-scale stakeholder analytics supporting strategy design for professional societies.
- Oct 25, 2025🎤 talkPresented “Privacy-Aware Porosity Prediction in Metal Additive Manufacturing using Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks” at INFORMS Annual Meeting 2025.
- Sep 2025🔬 researchProposal recommended: “Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Anomaly Detection in LPBF Systems” (NASA EPSCoR CAN, Aug 2025).
- Aug 01, 2025🤝 serviceSports Secretary, Bangladeshi Student Association (BSA), LSU. Leading sports committees to foster community engagement among international students.
- Aug 01, 2025📄 paperThree papers published in Manufacturing Letters (Q1).
- Jul 01, 2025🏆 awardGrant awarded: NSF LAMDA Seed Grant: “Physics-Informed ML for Process Defect Detection and Fatigue Modeling in WAAM”.
- Jun 25, 2025🎤 talkPresented three works at NAMRC 2025.
- Jun 5, 2025🏆 awardNSF Student Travel Award, NAMRC 2025, supporting conference attendance.
- Jun 03, 2025🏆 awardChampion, IISE Innovative Design Competition, IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025, for “Hearth AI: Meaningful Connection at your Fingertips”.
- Jun 02, 2025🏆 award2nd Runner-up, QCRE Data Challenge, IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025.
- May 31, 2025🎤 talkPresented two works at IISE 2025 on graph neural networks and vision transformers.
- Apr 2025🏆 awardNSF Student Travel Award, IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025.
- Feb-Mar 2025🔬 researchNSF Southwest I-Corps IdeaLaunch Program: Privacy-preserving certification framework for AMaaS platforms (Role: Entrepreneurial Lead).
- Mar 15, 2025🏆 awardBest graduate oral presentation award for “Foundation Model-Driven Predictive and Interpretable Modeling for Critical Materials in Renewable Energy Applications” (Materials Science/Engineering Division).
- Jan 28, 2025📄 paperAbstract accepted at the 99th Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences.
- Jan 04, 2025🤝 serviceStarted the Ph.D. program in Industrial Engineering at LSU (Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering).
- Dec 25, 2024🏆 awardBest Technical Presentation (Session ICCIT-2024) for “Predict Students’ Performance and Optimize Preparatory Leave: An Integrated Deep Learning and Dynamic Programming Approach”.
- Dec 26, 2024🎤 talkServed as an instructor for the CIOL Winter ML Bootcamp.
- Dec 16, 2024🎤 talkTwo IISE abstracts accepted for oral presentation at IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025.
- Oct 01, 2024📄 paperTwo mentored works accepted at DigiTwin 2024 Conference.
- Apr 2024🏆 awardUniversity Merit Scholarship, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (2020 to 2024), Top 5% for four consecutive years.
- Jan 2024📄 paperPaper accepted at an AAAI-24 workshop.
- Oct 2023📄 paperPaper accepted at a NeurIPS’23 workshop.
- Mar 2022🎓 milestoneFounded CIOL to bridge Industrial & Production Engineering and AI through research.
⭐ Selected work
Featured research
Four papers, each with a visual research summary of the method and findings. The full list is on the Publications page.
Entropy-Aware Model Predictive Control for Transient Quality Mitigation in WAAM
Poster, LSU Control Systems Symposium, 2026
Restart transients in WAAM can remain invisible in current and voltage. Spectral entropy of the arc sound serves as a control state for MPC, which shortens recovery through a front-loaded heat correction (simulation and surrogate-model study).
Feature-Aware Anisotropic Local Differential Privacy for Graph Learning in Metal AM
Major revision at ASME JCISE, arXiv:2604.05077
Embedding-level local differential privacy with feature-aware, anisotropic noise allocation, combined with a layer-wise graph attention network, enables collaborative porosity detection while preserving much of the non-private utility.
Beyond local receptive fields: vision transformers for real-time surface defect detection in FDM
International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2026
An optimized vision transformer on laser-scan depth maps uses global self-attention to detect spatially distributed surface anomalies in FDM in real time (macro-F1 0.877, support-weighted mAUC 0.972).
Fracture Finder: real-time vertebral fracture localization on thoracic spine X-rays with YOLOv8
IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, 2026
A single-stage YOLOv8 detector with targeted augmentation and weighted box fusion localizes suspected vertebral fractures on thoracic spine X-rays in about 126 ms per image.
📸 Highlights
Conferences and recognition
🤝 Get in touch
Let us build machines that correct themselves
I welcome conversations about research collaborations, internships, and roles in Physical AI, robotics, manufacturing AI, and applied science. Email is the fastest way to reach me.