Zhongliang Jiang

Assistant Professor in Robotics and AI
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong
Director of Medical Intelligence and Robotic Cognition (MIRoC) Lab, HKU ME
Email: zljiang@hku.hk

jzl.jpg

HW 7-04, Haking Wong Building

Pokfulam Road, HK SAR, China

Zhongliang Jiang is an Assistant Professor in Robotics and AI and the Director of the Medical Intelligence and Robotic Recognition (MIRoC) Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich in 2022, graduating with summa cum laude (the highest distinction), and his M.Eng. from Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) in 2017. From 2022 to 2025, he led the Robotics and Ultrasound Team (RobUSt) at the Computer-Aided Medical Procedures (CAMP) Lab, Technical University of Munich. Prior to that, he worked as a research assistant at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, from 2017 to 2018. His research has been published in leading venues such as IJRR, IEEE TRO, IEEE TMI, and Medical Image Analysis, and he has received a number of awards, including the MICCAI 2023 Best Paper Runner-up. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of ICRA (from 2024) and as the Lead Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics special issue on “Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging.”

His research interest broadly spans AI and robotics for improving healthcare, such as robot learning, medical image analysis, medical robotic systems, computer vision in medical applications, and human–robot interaction. His long-term vision is: (1) to achieve superhuman performance in healthcare robotics, and (2) to make advanced healthcare universally accessible and affordable.

Openings: We are always looking for strong candidates to join the lab as PhD / RA / Interns / Visiting students. We welcome applicants interested in Autonomous Surgical Robotics, Medical Image Analysis, Robotic Learning; Deep Learning, Vision–Language Models (VLMs), Vision–Language–Action Models (VLAs), and Multimodal Sensing Fusion. Students with strong self-motivation and a commitment to tackling real-world problems are preferred.

If you are an HKU student (BEng. or MSc.) interested in doing research with me, feel free to drop me an email!

News

Oct 23, 2025 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO)
Oct 05, 2025 1 paper accepted by IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
Sep 15, 2025 I will serve as an Area Chair for IPCAI2026
Sep 05, 2025 Joined HKU ME, and start Medical Intelligence and Robotic Recognition (MIRoC) Lab
Aug 07, 2025 I will serve as an Associate Editor for ICRA2026
Aug 03, 2025 1 paper accepted by Medical Image Analysis
Jul 14, 2025 1 paper accepted by Medical Image Analysis
Jun 17, 2025 3 papers accepted by MICCAI 2025, Daejeon
Jun 16, 2025 2 papers accepted by IROS 2025, Hangzhou
Apr 01, 2025 Talking robotic ultrasound at “AI-ready Healthcare” Podcast. Link
Mar 28, 2025 The CFP for IEEE TRO RAMI special issue has been released in RAS website.
Mar 17, 2025 1 paper accepted by Advanced Intelligent Systems
Feb 19, 2025 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Jan 27, 2025 1 paper accepted by ICRA2025
Jan 16, 2025 1 paper accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Dec 06, 2024 1 paper early accepted by IPCAI 2025
Dec 01, 2024 3rd Robotic-Assisted Medical Imaging workshop accepted by ICRA2025, Atlanta
Oct 25, 2024 Serving as Guest Editor for the TRO special collection on Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging
Aug 15, 2024 Serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA2025
Jul 03, 2024 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Jun 20, 2024 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
May 21, 2024 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Jan 02, 2024 1 paper accepted by Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Dec 21, 2023 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Dec 01, 2023 Will co-organize a workshop on 2nd Robotic-Assisted Medical Imaging at ICRA2024
Nov 21, 2023 1 paper accepted by The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
Oct 11, 2023 MICCAI 2023 Best paper Runner Up for MI-SegNet
Sep 01, 2023 Serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA2024
Aug 01, 2023 1 paper accepted by Medical Image Analysis
Jun 23, 2023 1 paper accepted by MICCAI2023
Jun 22, 2023 1 paper accepted by Medical Image Analysis
Jun 21, 2023 2 papers accepted by IROS2023
May 09, 2023 1 paper accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
May 08, 2023 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Dec 01, 2022 Will co-organize a workshop on Robotic-Assisted Medical Imaging at ICRA2023
Oct 18, 2022 Successfully defended doctoral thesis with highest distinction “summa cum laude”
Aug 08, 2022 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
Apr 24, 2022 1 paper directly accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Apr 18, 2022 1 paper directly accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Jun 30, 2021 1 paper accepted by IEEE RA-L (presented at IROS2021)
Jun 23, 2021 1 paper accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
Feb 28, 2021 1 paper accepted by ICRA2021
Oct 21, 2020 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
May 30, 2020 1 paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics
Jan 07, 2020 1 paper accepted by IEEE RA-L (presented at ICRA2020)

Selected Publications   [ Google Scholar ]

  1. Improving Robustness to Out-of-Distribution States in Imitation Learning via Deep Koopman-Boosted Diffusion Policy
    Dianye Huang, Nassir Navab, and Zhongliang Jiang
    IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO), 2025
  2. Synomaly noise and multi-stage diffusion: A novel approach for unsupervised anomaly detection in medical images
    Yuan Bi, Lucie Huang, Ricarda Clarenbach, Reza Ghotbi, Angelos Karlas, Nassir Navab, and Zhongliang Jiang
    Medical Image Analysis (MedIA), 2025
  3. Vibnet: Vibration-boosted needle detection in ultrasound images
    Dianye Huang, Chenyang Li, Angelos Karlas, Xiangyu Chu, KW Samuel Au, Nassir Navab, and Zhongliang Jiang
    IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2025
  4. Speckle2Self: Self-supervised ultrasound speckle reduction without clean data
    Xuesong Li, Nassir Navab, and Zhongliang Jiang
    Medical Image Analysis (MedIA), 2025
  5. Intelligent robotic sonographer: Mutual information-based disentangled reward learning from few demonstrations
    Zhongliang Jiang, Yuan Bi, Mingchuan Zhou, Ying Hu, Michael Burke, and Nassir Navab
    The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2024
  6. Ultrasound report generation with cross-modality feature alignment via unsupervised guidance
    Jun Li, Tongkun Su, Baoliang Zhao, Faqin Lv, Qiong Wang, Nassir Navab, Ying Hu, and Zhongliang Jiang
    IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2024
  7. Machine learning in robotic ultrasound imaging: Challenges and perspectives
    Yuan Bi, Zhongliang Jiang, Felix Duelmer, Dianye Huang, and Nassir Navab
    Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems (ARCRAS), 2024
  8. DefCor-Net: Physics-aware ultrasound deformation correction
    Zhongliang Jiang, Yue Zhou, Dongliang Cao, and Nassir Navab
    Medical Image Analysis (MedIA), 2023
  9. Robotic ultrasound imaging: State-of-the-art and future perspectives
    Zhongliang Jiang, Septimiu E Salcudean, and Nassir Navab
    Medical image analysis (MedIA), 2023
  10. MI-SegNet: Mutual information-based US segmentation for unseen domain generalization
    Yuan Bi, Zhongliang Jiang, Ricarda Clarenbach, Reza Ghotbi, Angelos Karlas, and Nassir Navab
    In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, best paper runner up 3 out of 2253 submissions, 2023

Professional Activities

Editor of journals and conferences

  • Guest Editor of the special collection on “Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging” in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) Link
  • Associate Editor of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024–2026)
  • Area Chair of International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions (IPCAI 2026)
  • Guest Editor of the special issue “AI Technologies and Applications in Medical Robots” in CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology

Organizer of international events

  • Main organizer of ICRA 2025 workshop “3rd RAMI — Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging” Link
  • Main organizer of ICRA 2024 workshop “2nd RAMI — Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging” Link
  • Main organizer of ICRA 2023 workshop “1st RAMI — Robot-Assisted Medical Imaging” Link
  • Organizer of the 1st MRC Symposium on Medical Robotics, Hong Kong, May 2024

Reviewer of international funding programs

  • Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), 2023
  • Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

Reviewer of journals and conferences

  • Journals: Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, T-ASE, T-MECH, T-IE, RA-L, T-BME, T-IM, T-UFFC, T-MRB, IEEE Sensors Journal, IJMRCAS
  • Conferences: ICRA (2015–2016, 2020–2023); IROS (2017, 2021–2023)

Invited Talks

  • 2025.11 — Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE), CUHK (Prof. Yunhui Liu)
  • 2025.10 — Guest Lecture, National University of Singapore (hosted by Prof. Yueming Jin)
  • 2025.10 — Department of Ultrasound, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai (hosted by Prof. Huixiong Xu)
  • 2025.06 — IROS2025, AI-Driven Surgical Autonomy (hosted by Prof. Mahdi Tavakoli) Link
  • 2025.09 — Autonomous Robotic Technology Seminar ARTS (hosted by Prof. Bo Lu)
  • 2025.09 — Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), HKSAR, CAS (hosted by Prof. Hongbin Liu)
  • 2025.06 — Hamlyn Symposium 2025, Robotic Focused Ultrasound Workshop (hosted by Prof. Arianna Menciassi) Link
  • 2025.04 — 2nd Hong Kong World Youth Science Conference, Invited Speaker
  • 2025.03 — UTokyo–TUM Annual Workshop (organized by Prof. Tim Lueth & Prof. Ichiro Sakuma)
  • 2025.03 — Podcast Interview: “AI-ready Healthcare” (hosted by Prof. Anirban Mukhopadhyay), Spotify. Link
  • 2024.12 — Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The University of Manchester (Prof. Andrew Weightman)
  • 2024.11 — Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong
  • 2024.11 — Visual Intelligence – International Researcher Forum
  • 2024.10 — 6th Sino-German Symposium on Intelligent Robots (SGIR), Frankfurt, Germany
  • 2024.06 — School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University (Prof. Lifeng Zhu)
  • 2024.05 — 2nd ICRA RAMI Workshop, Yokohama, Japan. Link
    • 2024.05 — Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE), CUHK (Prof. Xiangyu Chu & Prof. Samuel Au)
  • 2024.04 — Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London (Prof. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena)
  • 2024.04 — Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London (Prof. Mengxing Tang)
  • 2024.03 — School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh
  • 2024.04 — Department of Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano (Prof. Elena De Momi) Link
  • 2023.12 — Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Science and Technology of China (Prof. Kevin Zhou)
  • 2023.11 — The Sino-German Medical Artificial Intelligence Symposium (Prof. Kuangyu Shi)
  • 2023.10 — Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia (Prof. Tim Salcudean)
  • 2023.08 — Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta (Prof. Mahdi Tavakoli)
  • 2023.06 — Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (Prof. Ying Hu)
  • 2023.06 — 1st RAMI Workshop @ ICRA 2023, London Link
  • 2023.06 — The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University (Prof. Wei Wang)
  • 2023.04 — School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds (Prof. Pietro Valdastri)
  • 2023.02 — Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Lübeck (online) (Prof. Floris Ernst)
  • 2023.02 — The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (online) (Prof. John Galeotti & Prof. Howie Choset)