Alloy Das

Ames, Iowa, USA

I am a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University, working in the mech-ai lab under the supervision of Prof. Soumik Sarkar.

My research lies at the intersection of computer vision, multi-modal representation learning, and agricultural AI. I am currently working on:

EmbodiedMAE — a multi-modal masked autoencoder for 3D plant reconstruction from RGB images, depth maps, and point clouds, targeting Sorghum phenotyping.
Lighting-robust instance segmentation — extending SAM with a custom Lighting Convolutional Attention (LCA) module for robust segmentation under challenging illumination conditions.

Previously, I was a Research Assistant at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit (CVPRU), Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, supervised by Prof. Umapada Pal. My work there focused on scene text spotting, recognition, and editing — resulting in publications at WACV 2024, WACV 2025, ICRA 2024, and ICPR 2024.

I am a peer reviewer for The Visual Computer journal.

selected publications

Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?

A. Einstein*†, B. Podolsky*, and N. Rosen*

Phys. Rev., New Jersey. More Information can be found here , May 1935

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In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality. A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing the system. In quantum mechanics in the case of two physical quantities described by non-commuting operators, the knowledge of one precludes the knowledge of the other. Then either (1) the description of reality given by the wave function in quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities cannot have simultaneous reality. Consideration of the problem of making predictions concerning a system on the basis of measurements made on another system that had previously interacted with it leads to the result that if (1) is false then (2) is also false. One is thus led to conclude that the description of reality as given by a wave function is not complete.