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Josiah Aklilu

Ph.D. student
Stanford University
josaklil@stanford.edu


About Me

Currently, I’m a Biomedical Data Science PhD student @Stanford where I’m grateful to be advised by Prof. Serena Yeung-Levy in the MARVL lab. My research interests lie at the intersection of AI and healthcare, centered in computer vision models for surgical skill assessment, training, and feedback. I’m also more generally interested in video understanding and multimodal models in biomedicine. I’ve interned with Hoifung’s group @Microsoft Research and at @Apple Health AI.

Previously, I received my Bachelor’s in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics @University of Denver with a Distinction in Computer Science.

News

Publications & Preprints

  1. medRxiv
    Automated Video-Based Analysis of Surgical Meta-competencies Using Computer Vision
    Josiah Aklilu*, Joshua A. Villarreal*, Chloe K. Nobuhara, Charlotte Egeland, Xiaohan Wang , ...
    medRxiv, 2025.
    PDF BibTex

  2. CVPRw
    Zero-shot Action Localization via the Confidence of Large Vision-Language Models
    Josiah Aklilu, Xiaohan Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy
    CVPR Workshop on Video Large Language Models, 2025.
    PDF Code BibTex

  3. CVPR
    AutoConverter: Automated Generation of Challenging Multiple-Choice Questions for Vision Language Model Evaluation
    Yuhui Zhang, Yuchang Su, ... , Josiah Aklilu, ... , Ludwig Schmidt, Serena Yeung-Levy
    CVPR, 2025.
    PDF Code Project Page BibTex

  4. arXiv
    Systematic evaluation of large vision-language models for surgical artificial intelligence
    Anita Rau, Mark Endo, Josiah Aklilu, Jaewoo Heo, Khaled Saab , ...
    arXiv, 2025.
    PDF Code Project Page BibTex

  5. CVPR
    BIOMEDICA: An Open Biomedical Image-Caption Archive, Dataset, and Vision-Language Models Derived from Scientific Literature
    Alejandro Lozano, Min Woo Sun, ... , Josiah Aklilu, ... , Robert Tibshirani, Serena Yeung-Levy
    CVPR, 2025.
    PDF Code Project Page BibTex

  6. arXiv
    Large-scale vision-language dataset derived from open scientific literature to advance biomedical generalist AI
    Alejandro Lozano, Min Woo Sun, ... , Josiah Aklilu, ... , Robert Tibshirani, Serena Yeung-Levy
    arXiv, 2025.
    PDF Code BibTex

  7. NEJM AI
    Artificial Intelligence identifies factors associated with blood loss and surgical experience in cholecystectomy
    Josiah Aklilu, Min Woo Sun, Shelly Goel, Sebastiano Bartoletti, Anita Rau , ...
    NEJM Artificial Intelligence, 2024.
    PDF Code BibTex

  8. TMLR
    Revisiting Active Learning in the Era of Vision Foundation Models
    Sanket Rajan Gupte*, Josiah Aklilu*, Jeffrey J Nirschl, Serena Yeung-Levy
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024.
    PDF Code BibTex

  9. ECCV
    Depth-guided NeRF Training via Earth Mover’s Distance
    Anita Rau, Josiah Aklilu, F. Christopher Holsinger, and Serena Yeung-Levy
    European Conference on Computer Vision, 2024.
    PDF Code Project Page BibTex

  10. MLHC
    ALGES: Active learning with gradient embeddings for semantic segmentation of laparoscopic surgical images
    Josiah Aklilu, Serena Yeung-Levy
    Machine Learning for Health Care, 2022.
    PDF Code BibTex

  11. Surg Endosc
    Using artificial intelligence to model expert panel diagnosis of cholecystitis severity
    Griffin H Olsen, Emmett D Goodman, Josiah G Aklilu, Sebastiano Bartoletti, Kay S Hung , ...
    Surgical Endoscopy, 2025.
    PDF BibTex

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