Yi Ma

Biography

Dr. Yi Ma received Bachelors degree in Automation and 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. From 2000 to 2011, he served as a tenured associated professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he now holds an Adjunct Professorship. He also serves as a research associate 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 senior researcher at the Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China in fall 2006 and a visiting professor at EECS Department of UC Berkeley in spring 2007. Since January 2009, he has served as research manager for the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China. From January 2012, he also holds a Guest Professorship at the Univeristy of Science and Technology of China. He has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) from 2007 to 2011. 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. He currently serves as the associate editors for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), the IMA Journal on Information and Inference, and the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences. He serves as an Area Chair for NIPS 2011 and ICCV 2011 (Spain), and will be the Program Chair for ICCV 2013 (Australia), and General Chair for ICCV 2015 (Chile). 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, and 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. 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 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 a Fellow of IEEE, and a member of ACM and SIAM.

Research Interest

Computer Vision: Multiple-View Geometry / Image & Video Segmentation / Object Recognition Mathematics & Statistics: Algebraic Sets and Manifolds / Data Clustering & Classification / Sparse Representation Decision & Control: Vision-Based Decision & Control / Identification of Hybrid Systems / Autonomous Robot Navigation