Ulugbek S. Kamilov

Friends, I have a major update! After 8 wonderful years at WashU ESE/CSE, my team and I will be moving to UW-Madison ECE. I’m excited to collaborate with amazing new colleagues at UW, and will truly miss WashU and St. Louis—places where I’ve built many great memories. 🦡❤️

Excited for the upcoming IEEE SPS webinar!

One day hi to Chicago and see our approach for training diffusion models without ground truth data

Congratulations to @YuSunMark! 👏🏼

Excited to share that I successfully defended my PhD this Monday—officially Dr. Hu! I am deeply grateful to my advisor, collaborators, friends, and family for their support throughout this journey. In particular, I want to sincerely thank my phd advisor, @ukmlv, for his continuous guidance, support, and mentorship during my PhD. I joined his lab as a newcomer to research, and I have learned and grown so much under his mentorship. It also meant a lot to me that he drove five hours with @chicagoypark to attend my defense in person. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee — @2ptmvd, @an_hongyu , Prof. Joseph A. O’Sullivan, and Prof. Hong Hu — for their valuable guidance and support for my PhD research and dissertation. I am now continuing at Google AI Research as a Research Scientist, focusing on video/image generative models and computational imaging. Looking forward to what’s next.🚀

Chicago (@chicagoypark) and I drove from Madison to St. Louis and back to be there in person—and I’m really glad we did. Yuyang gave an amazing talk, and we got to celebrate with the team. We also enjoyed the beautiful WashU campus at sunset. Very proud of Yuyang.

Tomorrow, my student Yuyang Hu will defend his PhD in Electrical & Systems Engineering at WashU. Title: Inference-Time Scaling for Robust and Adaptive Computational Imaging More info: happenings.washu.edu/event/ese-phd-…

Marketing

Bukhara 🇺🇿 Kalyan Square. The city center. On the left is the Mir-i Arab madrasa, on the right is the Kalyan Mosque. In the middle stands the Kalyan Minaret.

@DimitrisPapail Amazing!

The Technical University of Crete. My undergrad campus. Overlooking the Cretan Sea where I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

One of my favorite plots in SGPnP that shows different solutions of the algorithm. We interpret these as different stationary points (hopefully, local minima) of the MAP loss associated with the learned score. As a reminder, SGPnP is not trying to sample, it is optimizing.

Check out our latest work on bridging optimization and generative models for imaging, enabling optimization-based plug-and-play methods to handle highly ill-posed inverse problems such as large-box inpainting! uw-cig.github.io/sgpnp_page/

@docmilanfar Nice explanation of "naranja" in Spanish. Remarkably, in Uzbek, we use "apelsin", which I believe was taken from Russian, which in turn seems to have some germanic roots.

In Iran we use Portugal colloquially name for sweet oranges. We use Narang (Sanskrit root of Orange) in poetic form. We also say Narenji for the color orange. And Narengi for small mandarin oranges. So Eastern and Western influences live side by side where citrus are concerned

Excited to share our new work that bridges optimization and generative models for imaging. Our SGPnP is not a sampler (generative model), it is an optimization method (plug-and-play method) that can compete with samplers on inverse problems. Amazing work by @chicagoypark!

"ADOBI: Adaptive Diffusion Bridge For Blind Inverse Problems with Application to MRI Reconstruction" was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. > Project Page: wustl-cig.github.io/adobiwww > Paper: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11457…

I recently have a talk to the guest of honor academic series of Central Asian International Science and Tech association. I spoke about the region in the context of AI, my own path, my research, and shared some tips. > recording of the talk: youtu.be/fGuLlFGI2D8?si…

A renowned prof calls a plumber. The plumber arrives, works for 5 mins, and gives a bill for $300. The prof is outraged: - Listen, I’m a top professor, and even I don’t earn that much for 5 minutes of work! The plumber shrugs: - I understand. I didn’t either—when I was a prof.

@CevherLIONS 👏🏼

Honored to share that I’ve been promoted to Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at EPFL, as announced by the ETH Council. ethrat.ch/en/appointment…

Congratulations to Anqi Li who will join the Rice ECE PhD program. Anqi worked with us as an MS researcher, while completing his MS in CS at WashU. Excited to see what he will do next.

It is always a pleasure to see when students get where they wanted to get. Eugene was always interested in robotics and GRASP Lab was his first choice.

@docmilanfar @dr_chizhang Interesting

@dr_chizhang can you calculate the probability of getting 10/15 papers accepted in a conference that has a 25% acceptance rate? it’s 0.068%

10 CVPR papers + 2 Findings! 🚀 Incredible to see that 8 of these came from our undergrads. Beginner's luck (or just pure talent!). Big congrats to the team! #cvpr #cvpr2026 #ArtificialIntelligence