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. 🦡❤️

I will be in UC San Diego on 23-25 June 2026, to attend the AIMS workshop (thanks @manorlaboratory for the invitation). If anyone is around, will be happy to grab a coffee. Info on the workshop: aims-2026.vercel.app

Check the SPS Computational Imaging webinar "Computational Imaging: Stochastic Generative Plug-and-play Priors" by Prof. Ulugbek Kamilov @ukmlv on June 3rd, 9:30am EST. Click the link to view details and register! signalprocessingsociety.org/…

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/e…

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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.

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/

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…

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=5YuW…

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.

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.

Today I learned that Ilya Malinin is the son of Tatiana Malinina, an Olympic skater who competed for Uzbekistan and was the 1999 Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final champion, 1999 Four Continents champion, and ten-time Uzbek national champion.

From learning alongside Nobel Prize–winning faculty to hands-on internships and undergraduate research, Big Ten students gain world-class opportunities turning education into opportunity and real-world impact across America.