Ashery Mbilinyi
I am an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria (UVic), having recently transitioned to industry. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at UVic, where I led the Medical Computer Vision (MCV) lab. I research computer vision, machine learning, and information retrieval methods to interpret the contents of medical images and their associated clinical data, aiming to augment clinicians’ diagnostics and decision-making processes.
Before joining UVic, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC), focusing on multimodal machine learning for cardiovascular disease intervention and management under the mentorship of Prof. Roger Tam. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where I had the privilege of working with Prof. Heiko Schuldt and Prof. Volker Roth on Medical Image Retrieval to augment Diagnostic Radiology. Prior to that, I completed my master’s at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, and my undergraduate degree at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), Tanzania.
News
| Oct 23, 2026 | As of October 23, 2026, I have transitioned to industry and am now an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria. I am no longer accepting new students. |
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| Oct 14, 2026 | 1 paper accepted at WACV 2027. |
| Sep 20, 2026 | 2 papers accepted at MICAD 2026. |
| Dec 21, 2025 | 🎉 Congratulations to our lab member Rishabh Jha, who placed 27th out of 114 teams in the PhysioNet Challenge 2025. His paper, “Automated Chagas Disease Detection from 12-Lead ECGs Using a Residual Network with Robust Preprocessing,” has been accepted at Computing in Cardiology (CinC) 2025, a leading conference in clinical cardiology and cardiovascular physiology computing. |
| Dec 17, 2025 | Google Research spotlighted the Data Science for Health Ideathon across Africa launched as part of our workshop, highlighting the quality of ideas, mentorship, and health-impact focus. Read the spotlight → here |
Selected Publications
Honors and Awards
| 2021 | 2nd Place, European Roche Healthcare Xplorers Competition — built a GAN model to generate cancer patient-reported outcomes |
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| 2017 – 2021 | Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship — to pursue PhD studies in Switzerland |
| 2018 | Winner, Hackathon at the ScaDS.AI Summer School for Big Data and Machine Learning — Leipzig, Germany |
| 2015 – 2017 | ABE Initiative Scholarship (JICA) — to pursue MSc studies in Japan |