Yi Ma
Also known as Ma Yi
Yi Ma is a computer vision researcher whose work spans geometric reconstruction, robust matrix recovery, and white-box deep networks. He studies automation and applied mathematics at Tsinghua, completes graduate study at UC Berkeley, and builds a career across UIUC, Microsoft Research Asia, ShanghaiTech, Berkeley, and HKU. His work includes the ICCV Marr Prize paper, Robust Principal Component Analysis, and ReduNet. At HKU, he directs the Institute of Data Science and is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and SIAM.
- Now at
- University of Hong Kong
- Works
- 371
- Citations
- 44,437
- h-index
- 79
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1995–2000
Training in math and engineering
At Tsinghua, he earns bachelor's degrees in automation and applied mathematics in 1995. At UC Berkeley, he completes master's study in EECS and mathematics and a PhD in EECS by 2000.
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1999
An answer to reconstruction limits
His paper with Stefano Soatto, Jana Kosecka, and Shankar Sastry, “Euclidean Reconstruction and Reprojection up to Subgroups,” receives ICCV’s 1999 David Marr Prize. It gives explicit formulas for ambiguities in scene structure, motion, and camera calibration when conditions for unique reconstruction fail.
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2000–2011
A decade at UIUC
From 2000 to 2011, he serves on the ECE faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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2009–2014
Recovering signal from corruption
At Microsoft Research Asia, he manages the Visual Computing group and serves as principal researcher. With Emmanuel Candes, Xiaodong Li, and John Wright, he coauthors “Robust Principal Component Analysis?”, which shows how low-rank structure and sparse corruption can be recovered under suitable assumptions.
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2014–2018
From ShanghaiTech to Berkeley
He serves as executive dean of ShanghaiTech's School of Information Science and Technology from 2014 to 2017. In 2018, he joins UC Berkeley EECS faculty.
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2022
Building a white-box deep network
In 2022, with five coauthors, he publishes ReduNet, a white-box deep network whose layers follow optimization of a rate-reduction objective.
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Since 2023
Leading data science at HKU
At HKU, he takes up the directorship of the Institute of Data Science on January 12, 2023, while holding a Chair Professor post in the institute and the Department of Computer Science.
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As of October 2026
Recognition and conference service
He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and SIAM. He served as ICCV program chair in 2013 and general chair in 2015.
Sources and credits
Photo: people.eecs.berkeley.edu; Homepage of Professor Yi Ma; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: people.eecs.berkeley.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.