News
2026
March 2026
SAFE lab will have one oral and two poster presentations at the 5th AI in Agriculture conference. Congrats!
March 2026
Dr. Wang was funded by the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (NSF CAREER Award). Congrats!
March 2026
One paper authored by Yang for Portable Electrochemical Impedance Biosensing with DRT-Enabled Machine Learning for Detecting E. coli O157:H7 in Poultry Meat was accepted by Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. Congrats!
February 2026
One paper authored by Samuel for Cross-Facility Reliable Deep Learning Based Beef Marbling Assessment Via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Regression was accepted by Journal of ASABE. Congrats!
February 2026
One paper authored by Siavash for A State-Adaptive Koopman Control Framework for Real-Time Deformable Tool Manipulation in Robotic Environmental Swabbing was accepted by Advanced Robotics Research. Congrats!
February 2026
One editorial paper authored by Ramesh for Precision Farming Technologies for Monitoring Livestock and Poultry was accepted by AgriEngineering. Congrats!
February 2026
One paper authored by Amirreza for ChicGrasp: Imitation-Learning-Based Customized Dual-Jaw Gripper Control for Manipulation of Delicate, Irregular Bio-Products was accepted by Advanced Robotics Research. Congrats!
January 2026
One paper authored by Yihong for Synthetic Data Augmentation for Enhanced Chicken Carcass Instance Segmentation was accepted by IEEE Transactions on AgriFood Electronics. Congrats!
January 2026
Avisekh Tripathy joined the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome!
2025
December 2025
One paper coauthored by Dr. Wang for Rapid Detection of Chicken Residues on Poultry Plant Surfaces Using Color and Fluorescence Spectrometry was accepted by Foods. Congrats!
December 2025
One paper authored by Chaitanya for Thermal imaging-guided detection of transparent plastic contaminants on chicken breast: A combined vision and simulation approach was accepted by Food Research International. Congrats!
December 2025
One paper authored by Dr. Bist for Automated Detection of Kinky Back in Broiler Chickens Using Optimized Deep Learning Techniques was accepted by AgriEngineering. Congrats!
November 2025
Dr. Wang was invited to present at the Arkansas Research and Computing Stakeholder Forum, Little Rock, AR.
November 2025
One paper authored by Dr. Bist for Enhancing poultry multi-behavior detection with semi-supervised auto-labeling and prompt-driven zero-shot recognition was accepted by Computer and Electronics in Agriculture. Congrats!
October 2025
The First LionHog Hackathon was successfully held at MSSU, Joplin. The event was jointly organized by the Cognitive Robotics and IoT Consortium (CRIC) and the SAFE Lab. Learn more
October 2025
Dr. Wang attended and presented at the NSF FRR/NRI annual meeting, Washington DC.
October 2025
Dr. Wang was funded by the College of Engineering to initiate the UofA smart agriculture faculty research working group.
October 2025
Three presentations were presented at the Arkansas Session ASABE annual meeting. Akawasi and Sam won the first and the second prize in the student poster presentation competition. Congrats!
September 2025
Three presentations were presented at the Arkansas Association for Food Protection, and Chaitanya won the second prize in the student poster presentation competition. Congrats!
September 2025
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for A review of successful workplace interventions to mitigate work-related musculoskeletal disorders in poultry processing plant workers: current knowledge and future prospects was accepted by Safety and Health at Work. Congrats!
September 2025
One paper authored by Siavash for Evaluation of Robotic Swabbing and Fluorescent Sensing to Monitor the Hygiene of Food Contact Surfaces was accepted by Foods. Congrats!
September 2025
One paper authored by Yang for Deep-Learning-Enhanced Automated Coherent-Light Diffraction System for High-Speed, Highly Accurate Strain-Specific Foodborne Bacterial Recognition was accepted by Journal of Agriculture and Food Research. Congrats!
August 2025
Yang presented his work about Wireless handheld piezoelectric immuno-biosensing system at the ACS Fall meeting. Congrats!
August 2025
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for YOLO-ALDS: an instance segmentation framework for tomato defect segmentation and grading based on active learning and improved YOLO11 was accepted by Computer and Electronics in Agriculture. Congrats!
July 2025
Six presentations from SAFE will be presented at ASABE 2025 (2 oral + 4 posters).
June 2025
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Machine Learning-Guided Wax Fractionation from Bioethanol Side-Stream Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide was accepted by ACS Sustainable Resource Management. Congrats!
June 2025
Dr. Paudel joined the SAFE lab as a postdoc associate. Welcome!
June 2025
One paper authored by Yang for Palm-size Wireless Piezoelectric Immune-biosensing System for Rapid E. coli O157: H7 Detection was accepted by Sensors International. Congrats!
May 2025
Dr. Wang will chair the Vision-based Tactile Sensing session in ICRA 2025, Atlanta, GA.
May 2025
Dr. Bist will land as an Assistant Professor at the NCSU BAE department starting in July. Congrats! Thanks for your excellent contributions to the SAFE lab.
May 2025
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for The Rapid Detection of Foreign Fibers in Seed Cotton Based on Hyperspectral Band Selection and a Lightweight Neural Network was accepted by Agriculture. Congrats!
May 2025
Samuel successfully defended his undergraduate Honors Thesis. Congrats!
May 2025
Yinuo and Vishal joined the lab as undergraduate research assistants. Welcome!
May 2025
Dr. Wang was selected for the College of Engineering Dean's Award of Excellence Rising Star Research Award! Congrats!
May 2025
Dr. Wang was selected for the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department Outstanding Researcher Award Year 24-25! Congrats!
April 2025
Two presentations from Siavash and Amirreza were selected to be presented in ICRA 2025, Atlanta, GA. Congrats!
April 2025
Siavash was selected as the 2024–2025 BAEG Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award recipient! Congrats!
April 2025
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for UniT: Data Efficient Tactile Representation with Generalization to Unseen Objects was accepted by IEEE RAL. Congrats!
March 2025
Dr. Wang starts to serve as the Associate Editor of Journal of ASABE.
March 2025
One paper authored by Pouya for Cost-Effective Active Laser Scanning System for Depth-Aware Deep-Learning-Based Instance Segmentation in Poultry Processing was accepted by AgriEngineering. Congrats!
February 2025
Dr. Wang starts to serve on the Editor Board of Agricultural Products Processing and Storages.
February 2025
The lab was funded by Arkansas Research Alliance (ARA) to develop precision animal management systems.
2024
December 2024
Undergraduate research assistant Samuel Vinson won UARK Honors College Research Grant for $4,000. Congrats!
December 2024
One paper authored by Prince for Environmental-Health Convergence: A deep learning-oriented decision support system for catalyzing sustainable healthy food systems was accepted by Environmental Modelling & Software. Congrats!
December 2024
One paper authored by Prince for Insights from consumers' exposure to environmental nutrition information on a dashboard for improving sustainable healthy food choices was accepted by Cleaner and Responsible Consumption. Congrats!
December 2024
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Blackberry Growth Monitoring and Feature Quantification with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Remote Sensing was accepted by AgriEngineering. Congrats!
November 2024
One paper authored by Chaitanya for Neural network architecture search enabled wide-deep learning (NAS-WD) for spatially heterogenous property awared chicken woody breast classification and hardness regression was accepted by Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture. Congrats!
November 2024
Chaitanya successfully defended his M.S. thesis about hyperspectral imaging-based chicken woody breast detection. Congrats!
October 2024
Dr. Wang hosted Hass Hall Academy Robotic Club for the lab visit and collaboration discussion with Dr. Cengiz Koparan and Dr. Ramesh Bist.
October 2024
Six posters from SAFE lab were presented at Arkansas Session ASABE annual meeting.
October 2024
One paper authored by Siavash for Leveraging Imitation Learning in Agricultural Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey and Comparative Analysis was accepted by Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Congrats!
September 2024
Siavash, Yihong, and Pouya won 2024 UARK College of Engineering Fellowship. Congrats!
September 2024
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for EAGLE: Efficient Adaptive Geometry-based Learning in Cross-view Understanding was accepted by NeurIPS. Congrats!
September 2024
One paper authored by Dr. Bist for Sustainable poultry farming practices: A critical review of current strategies and future prospects was accepted by Poultry Science. Congrats!
September 2024
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Review of deep learning-based methods for non-destructive evaluation of agricultural products was accepted by Biosystems Engineering. Congrats!
June 2024
One paper authored by Dr. Wang for Is human perception reliable? Toward illumination robust food freshness prediction from food appearance—Taking lettuce freshness evaluation as an example was accepted by Journal of Food Engineering. Congrats!
June 2024
The lab was funded by USDA AFRI to develop hyperspectral solutions for chicken woody breast detection and texture regression.
May 2024
Dr. Ramesh Bist joined the lab as a PostDoc. Welcome!
May 2024
One paper authored by Dr. Wang for MEMO: dataset and methods for robust multimodal retinal image registration with large or small vessel density differences was accepted by Biomedical Optics Express. Congrats!
April 2024
Pouya Sohrabipour won first place in the student poster competition at the third USDA-sponsored AI in Ag conference. Congrats!
March 2024
Amirreza Davar joined the lab as an M.S. student. Welcome!
2023
December 2023
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Genome-wide association mapping reveals loci for enzymatic discoloration on cut lettuce was accepted by Postharvest Biology and Technology. Congrats!
November 2023
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Modeling and optimization of bioenergy production from co-digestion of poultry litter with wheat straw in anaerobic sequencing batch reactor: Response surface methodology and artificial neural network was accepted by Applied Energy. Congrats!
September 2023
The lab was funded by USDA AMS to develop a domain transferrable beef marbling evaluation system.
September 2023
Dr. Wang has a presentation at Arkansas Session ASABE annual meeting.
September 2023
Peng Zhou joined the lab as a PostDoc. Welcome!
August 2023
Siavash Mahmoudi joined the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome!
August 2023
Pouya Sohrabipour joined the lab as a M.S. student. Welcome!
July 2023
Dr. Wang, Yihong, and Chaitanya have 3 presentations at ASABE annual meeting.
July 2023
Dr. Wang and Dr. Cengiz Koparan formed the first AG robotic team at UARK who attended the robotic competition for cotton harvest at ASABE 2023.
June 2023
The lab was funded by USDA AFRI A1521 program for develop robotic solutions for facilitating the blue crab industry. The program is led by University of Maryland.
June 2023
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for A review of three-dimensional vision techniques in food and agriculture applications was accepted by Smart Agricultural Technology. Congrats!
May 2023
Dr. Wang made a presentation about robust vision intelligence for food industry in USDA AMS seminar.
March 2023
Dr Swarna Murugan presented at 2023 International Conference on Networking and Communications (ICNWC) and won Best Paper Award. Congrats!
January 2023
The lab was funded by USDA AFRI Meat and Poultry Processing and Food Safety program for developing mobile robotic platform for autonomous bio-mapping in chicken processing plant.
2022
December 2022
The lab was funded by NSF NRI 3.0/USDA AFRI program for developing autonomous and intelligence solutions for chicken handling.
November 2022
Dr Swarna Murugan presented at The 27th NSF EPSCoR National Conference.
November 2022
The lab was funded by NSF I-Corp program to train postdoc Dr. Sethu for technology transfer.
September 2022
Dr. Wang won UARK New Faculty Teaching Award. Congrats!
August 2022
Chaitanya Pallerla joined the lab as a M.S. student. Welcome!
July 2022
Dr. Wang and his previous teammate Mohamed Ali won the second prize in the oral presentation competition at ASABE 2022 annual meeting, Houston. Congrats!
May 2022
Gabriel Cox joined the lab as an undergraduate assistant. Welcome!
May 2022
Yihong Feng joined the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome!
May 2022
The lab was funded by UADA research incentive award to develop a digitalized and portable chicken fleshing score measurement instrument.
May 2022
The lab was funded by UARK Engineering Research and Innovation Seed Funding Program to develop 3D imaging devices for food 3D scanning.
May 2022
Dr. Murugan won the second prize in the poster presentation competition at NSF EPSCoR DART annual meeting. Congrats!
March 2022
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Active-Laser Scanning and Intelligent Picking for Automated Loading of Agricultural Commodities to Processing Machines accepted by 2022 ASABE Annual meeting. Congrats!
March 2022
Robert Blindauer joined the lab as an undergraduate assistant. Welcome!
January 2022
Olivia Torres joined the lab as an undergraduate assistant. Welcome!
January 2022
The lab was funded by South Region Small Fruit Consortium (SRSFC) to evaluate grape properties from non-invasive hyperspectral imaging system.
2021
December 2021
Dr. Swarna Murugan volunteered at the lab as a research associate. Welcome!
December 2021
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Prediction of aqueous glucose concentration using hyperspectral imaging was accepted by 2021 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE EMBC). Congrats!
October 2021
One paper co-authored by Dr. Wang for Novel application of long short-term memory network for 3D to 2D retinal vessel segmentation in adaptive optics—optical coherence tomography volumes was accepted by Applied Sciences. Congrats!
September 2021
The lab was funded by Arkansas NSF EPSCoR Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART) program to develop illumination robust deep learning models.
August 2021
The lab was funded by FY22 UADA Infrastructure and Equipment Funding for HSI systems.
July 2021
Dr. Wang presented his recent work on Designs of a customized active 3D scanning system for food processing applications at ASABE 2021 annual meeting.
June 2021
Dr. Wang joined University of Arkansas as an Assistant Professor.