Brief Biography of Professor Yi Ma

Education and Experience:

Education: Yi Ma received his Bachelor's degree in Automation and a second degree in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995. He received an Master degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) in 1997, a second Master degree in Mathematics in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in EECS in 2000, all from the University of California at Berkeley.

Academia: From 2000 to 2011, he served as an assistant and associate professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he now holds an Adjunct Professorship. He also served as a research professor both in the Decision & Control Group of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and in the Image Formation & Processing Group of the Beckman Institute. He was a visiting professor at EECS Department of UC Berkeley during sabbatical in spring 2007. From February 2014 to November 2017, he was a professor and then the executive dean of the School of Information Science and Technology of ShanghaiTech University. While he was working in China, he had also held several courtesy appointments as Adjunct Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology, the Univeristy of Science and Technology, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, while working in China. He has joined the faculty of the EECS Department of University of California at Berkeley since January 2018. Starting in Januaray 2023, he serves as the inaugural director of the Institute of Data Science of the University of Hong Kong. He also served as the head of the Computer Science Department of the University of Hong Kong from June 2023 to July 2024. Starting in July 1st 2024, he serves as the inaugural director of the School of Computing and Data Science of the Hong Kong University.

Industrial: He was a visiting senior researcher at the Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, during sabbatical in fall 2006. From January 2009 to January 2014, he served as the research manager and principal researcher of the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China. He is a co-founder of a light-field 3D acquisition startup company DGene Digital Technology (previously known as Plex-VR), established in early 2016. He has served as senior advisor to the Bytedance Research Lab in Silicon Valley from 2017 to 2020. He is on the Technical Advisorial Board (TAB) of Malong Technologies (a computer vision startup company in Shenzhen, China), since June 2018. He also serves as an independent director on the Board of Directors of Cheetah Mobile Inc. (NYSE: CMCM), since March 2018.

Academic Services: He has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) from 2007 to 2011, the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) from 2010 to 2014, the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2013 to 2017, and a founding associate editor of SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences. He served on the Senior Editorial Board of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine from 2015 to 2017. He has also served as the chief guest editor for special issues for the Proceedings of IEEE and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2010 and 2011, respectively. He currently serves as a founding associate editor for the IMA Journal on Information and Inference since 2012 and for the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS) since 2018. For conferences, he has served many times as Area Chairs for ICCV, CVPR, and NIPS, and the Program Chair for ICCV 2013 (Australia), and General Chair for ICCV 2015 (Chile). He is one of the co-founders of the new Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL), starting in 2024.

Research Interests:

His research interests include 3D computer vision, low-dim models for high-dim data, scalable optimization and machine learning, and intelligent machines. Recent research topics include large-scale 3D geometry reconstruction and interaction, as well as the relationships between low-dimemsional models and deep networks. Past research topics include Sparse Representation and Low-Rank Approximation for high-dimensional data, Clustering, Compression, and Classification of High-dimensional Data, and Reconstruction of 3D Structures from Images . His work has found broad applications in areas such as Segmentation of Natural Images, and Robust Face Recognition, and Aligning and Rectifying Images. He has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed articles and two popular textbooks: "An Invitation to 3-D Vision" published in 2003 and "Generalized Principal Component Analysis" published in 2016, all by Springer-Verlag. His new textbook on "High-dimensional Data Analysis with Low-dimensional Models" is published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Academic Distinctions:

He received the first prize of Excellent Student Scholarship from Tsinghua University in 1994 and the Regents Fellowship from U.C. Berkeley from 1995 to 1996. His PhD research won the David Marr Best Paper Award with S. Soatto, J. Kosecka, and S. Sastry, at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 1999. He also received honorable mention for the Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award with R. Vidal at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2004, the Sang Uk Lee Best Student Paper Award with his students Shankar Rao, Hossein Mobahi, and Allen Yang at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) in 2009, and the second prize of the Best Paper Award of the IMA Journal on Information and Inference in 2015. Yi Ma was the recipient of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2003. He was also the recipient of the Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2005. He received the Gold Star Award from Microsoft Corporate in 2009 and the Best Research Team of the Year Award from Microsoft Research Asia in 2012. He has given over two dozens of Plenary Talks at international conferences and workshops. He was on the Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent of the University of Illinois for Spring'01, Fall'02, and Spring'06. Yi Ma is an IEEE Fellow since 2013, an ACM Fellow since 2017, and a SIAM Fellow since 2020. He is ranked the World's Highly Cited Researchers since 2016 by Clarivate Analytics of Thomson Reuters and ranked Top 50 of the World's Most Influential Authors in Computer Science by Semantic Scholar, reported by Science Magazine in April 2016.