Suman Chowdhury

CSIR Senior Research Fellow (GATE) at CSIR-CMERI, Durgapur

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I am a joint PhD candidate in the cotutelle doctoral program between the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR) and RMIT University, Melbourne — a program I’ve been part of since May 2026, jointly supervised by Dr. Rajesh P. Barnwal at CSIR-CMERI and Dr. Haytham Fayek and Prof. Feng Xia at RMIT. I’m currently based at the AI & IoT Lab of CSIR–Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-CMERI), Durgapur, and will relocate to RMIT on 1 February 2027 to continue the program directly under my supervisors there.

My research sits at the intersection of computer vision and autonomous systems: teaching machines to understand road scenes rather than just detect objects in them — recognising events, reasoning about how agents relate to one another, and inferring cause and effect in the ambiguous, everyday traffic that self-driving cars actually have to navigate. The gap between a model that spots a pedestrian and one that grasps why they just stepped off the curb is where most of the interesting work lives, and it’s the problem I keep coming back to.

This path started with a B.Tech project at Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College and an internship at IIT Kharagpur exploring distributed storage systems and coding theory — a detour through systems and information theory that still shapes how I think about structure and reasoning today.

news

Apr 16, 2026 Selected for the AcSIR-RMIT joint PhD program, under the supervision of Dr. Haytham Fayek and Prof. Feng Xia at RMIT. :boom: :sunglasses:
Mar 8, 2026 Scored an overall band 7.5 in IELTS Academic. :sunglasses:
Oct 10, 2025 Paper “Near Real Time Detection of APT Attack in Industrial IoT Environment” (with Bidya Sahu and Rajesh P. Barnwal) accepted at ICDCN 2026, Nara, Japan. Bidya presented on our behalf after winning the ACM-W Travel Grant — huge congrats to her! :boom:
Mar 17, 2025 Travelled to Delhi to visit Prof. Prerana Mukherjee at Jawaharlal Nehru University as part of the ACM India Anveshan Setu Fellowship.
Oct 23, 2024 Selected for full support to attend the ACM India PhD Clinic at the ACM CODS-COMAD Dec’24
Oct 21, 2024 Manuscript titled “Real-Time Vision-based Scene Classification for Adaptive Behavior in Autonomous Mobile Robots” accepted for presentation in the Demo Track at the ACM CODS-COMAD Dec’24
Oct 3, 2024 Manuscript titled “Study on the Efficacy of GPT Double Heads Model for Question-Answering Task in Bengali” accepted for oral presentation at IEEE Calcutta Conference 2024 (CALCON)
Feb 25, 2024 Selected among 46 CS/IT PhD scholars across India for the ACM India Anveshan Setu Fellowship 2024–25, a mentorship program with leading researchers. Read more
Dec 11, 2023 Successfully presented in DAC-II meeting. The Doctoral Advisory Committee (DAC) found the progress to be satisfactory. :smirk: :sunglasses:
Nov 6, 2023 Selected for full support to attend the ‘ACM India PhD Clinic’ and the ‘18th ARCS Symposium 2024’ at IIT and NISER, Bhubaneswar from Feb 8-10, 2024. :boom: :smile: :sunglasses:
Nov 1, 2023 Received 3rd place in the Inter College/University Quiz Competition held during “Vigilance Awareness Week 2023” at CSIR-CMERI, Durgapur.
Jul 20, 2023 Passed the Ph.D. comprehensive examination. Major milestone achieved! :boom: :smile: :sunglasses:
Jul 12, 2023 Successfully presented in DAC-I meeting. Doctoral Advisory Committee (DAC) found the progress to be satisfactory. :sunglasses:
Jun 6, 2023 Successfully defended M.Tech thesis titled “Multi-Label Image Classification for Road Scene Recognition” in the presence of the Doctoral Advisory Committee (DAC). :boom: :sunglasses:
Mar 1, 2023 Successfully presented M.Tech mini project and dissertation part-I to the Doctoral Advisory Committee (DAC). :smile: :sunglasses:
Nov 6, 2022 Received 2nd Position in the Inter College/University Quiz Competition held on the occasion of “Vigilance Awareness Week 2022” at CSIR-CMERI, Durgapur