Wei-Ying Ma

Wei-Ying Ma is a Taiwanese computer scientist. He has authored over 300 papers and obtained 169 patents as of January 2024. 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.

He was the general co-chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2011 and also a member of the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee from 2010 through 2016. 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. In this role, he supervised research groups that took part in the development of technologies for Microsoft's Bing Search Engine and Microsoft Advertising. assuming the position of Vice President and Head of the AI Lab in 2017. He and his team worked on the development of machine learning models for content analysis, video analysis systems, and innovative techniques for music generation, recommendation, speech recognition, and content creation. There was also a possible ban by the US Government due to security concerns and suspicions that Beijing could force the owner, who is of Chinese descent, to turn over user data.

Upon Leaving Bytedance, Ma transitioned to AI Industry Research (AIR), a research institute under Tsinghua University in Beijing. This initiative, led by scientist and entrepreneur Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang, established a center dedicated to scientific research and technological innovation focusing on areas such as autonomous driving, AI+IoT, and neuromorphic computing.

Additionally, Ma co-founded Helixon, a startup aimed at advancing next-generation AI for antibody design and protein therapeutics discovery. He also served as Director of the Health Computing Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) from 2021 to 2023 advancing AI applications in healthcare. Additionally, for his work at ByteDance, Ma received the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award.