Wei-Ying Ma (Chinese: 马维英) is a Taiwanese computer scientist. He received a Bachelor of Science from National Tsing Hua University and went on to earn a Master of Science and PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. An ACM Fellow and recipient of the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award, he has authored over 300 papers and obtained 169 patents as of January 2024.
As Vice President and head of the AI lab at ByteDance, Ma led the development of AI-powered technologies integrated into platforms like Douyin, TikTok, and Jinri Toutiao, which impacted digital content creation and distribution. He currently holds the position of Huiyan Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and serves as the Chief Scientist at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), a program he established alongside Ya-Qin Zhang in 2020.
He has served on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) and the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. He also served as a program co-chair of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW) 2008, a program co-chair of the Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM) '07, and the general co-chair of the Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) '08. Additionally, he was the general co-chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2011 and a member of the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee from 2010 through 2016.[3]
Education
Ma obtained a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1990. He continued his studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, earning a Master of Science in 1994, and a Ph.D in electrical and computer engineering in 1997.[4] During his doctoral studies, Ma was involved in the Alexandria Digital Library project, focusing on the development of innovative image retrieval systems and segmentation solutions.[3,7,6]
Career
Ma began his professional career at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, where he focused on multimedia content analysis and adaptation. In 2001, he joined Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as Assistant Managing Director, supervising research groups that took part in the development of technologies for Microsoft's Bing Search Engine and Microsoft Advertising.[8,2] He developed techniques for web page analysis by utilizing visual cues to extract structured data, which led to the creation of Microsoft Academic Search, a search engine offering automatic entity summaries and improved user navigation. Additionally, he led projects such as the Microsoft Graph Engine, facilitating knowledge graph processing for web search and natural language understanding, the creation of the Microsoft Concept Graph repository of concepts and facts derived from extensive web and search data, and the Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit aimed at improving the efficiency and scalability of machine learning tasks involving large datasets.[3]
Ma joined ByteDance in 2016, assuming the role of Vice President and Head of the AI Lab in 2017.[9] During his time at ByteDance, he established the ByteDance AI Lab to focus on research and technology development in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, expanding the team from five AI researchers in 2016 to 150 by the end of 2018. He and his team worked on developing machine learning models for content analysis, video analysis systems, and innovative techniques for music generation, recommendation, speech recognition, and content creation, contributing to AI-powered creation and dissemination technologies integrated into products such as Douyin, TikTok, Jinri Toutiao, CapCut, and Lark.[1,3] Ma left ByteDance in 2020, coinciding with worldwide regulatory challenges faced by TikTok, including a ban in India in June of that year and a possible ban by the US Government over security concerns and suspicions regarding user data access by Beijing.[11,13,14,10,15,12]
Upon leaving ByteDance, Ma transitioned to the AI Industry Research (AIR) institute under Tsinghua University in Beijing, an initiative led by scientist and entrepreneur Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang dedicated to scientific research and technological innovation in areas such as autonomous driving, AI+IoT, and neuromorphic computing.[16,7] Additionally, Ma co-founded Helixon, a startup aimed at advancing next-generation AI for antibody design and protein therapeutics discovery, and served as Director of the Health Computing Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) from 2021 to 2023 to advance AI applications in healthcare. As of 2024, Ma leads AI initiatives for scientific applications as Chief Scientist, placing a specific emphasis on AI-driven drug discovery and generative AI for biology and chemistry.[3]
Awards
Ma has been recognized with several awards throughout his career. In 2009, he received the Management Excellence Trailblazer Award at Microsoft for his contributions within the organization.[3] In 2010, he was honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the school of EECS at Tsinghua University, and his contributions to the field were further acknowledged when he became an ACM Distinguished Member that same year. In 2023, Ma was recognized as an ACM Fellow in the US for his leadership and significant contributions to web search and data mining.[17] Additionally, for his work at ByteDance, Ma received the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award.[3]