Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur

Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University's College of Engineering. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Oklahoma State University. He is an IEEE Senior Member and has received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research on multi-modal event understanding.

Dr. Aakur received his PhD from the University of South Florida, where he worked with Dr. Sudeep Sarkar in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Group. He also holds a Master's degree in Management Information Systems from the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida and an undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Velammal Engineering College, Anna University, India.

His research focuses on the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing, and psychology, with the goal of building intelligent agents that understand the visual world beyond simple recognition or captioning. His work encompasses self-supervised predictive learning for video event segmentation, commonsense reasoning to ground perception and prior knowledge, and generative modeling for building knowledge systems. Much of his group's current work focuses on analyzing, modeling, and synthesizing complex video scenes, with applications in agriculture and animal diagnostics.

His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on open-world visual understanding, neurosymbolic reasoning, and multimodal learning. His work spans from fundamental computer vision problems like egocentric action recognition and scene graph generation to applied research in agricultural technology and biomedical informatics. He has successfully published at top-tier conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and WACV, as well as in high-impact journals like IEEE TPAMI.

• NSF CAREER Award (2022)
• IEEE Senior Member (2024)

Dr. Aakur serves as Area Chair for major conferences including CVPR, WACV, ICML, and NeurIPS, and as Associate Editor for Pattern Recognition journal. He has successfully mentored numerous students who have published at top venues in computer vision and machine learning. His research group has received funding from sources including the NSF and USDA for projects related to multimodal time series classification and stress detection in precision agriculture. The lab maintains active collaborations with institutions including the University of South Florida and Florida State University.