Brief Biography of Yi Ma

Education and Experience:

Yi Ma was born in Sichuan Province, China, in November 1972. He received two 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. Upon graduation in August 2000, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he now holds the rank of associate professor (with tenure). He is an affiliated faculty of the Computer Science Department. 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. Starting from January 2009, he will serve as research manager for the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence since 2007. He has also served as the chief guest editor for special issues for the Proceedings of IEEE and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He will also serve as Program Chair for ICCV 2013 in Sydney, Australia.

Research Interest:

His research interests include computer vision and systems theory. Recent research topics include multiple-view geometry, vision-based control, clustering and classification of high-dimensional data, estimation of hybrid models and systems. His work has found broad applications in areas such as reconstruction of 3-D structures from 2-D images, segmentation of natural images, and face recognition. He has published more than seventy peer-reviewed articles. He is the first author of the textbook "An Invitation to 3-D Vision," published by Springer in 2003. He is currently working on a new book, "Generalized Principal Component Analysis," expected to be published by Springer in 2010.

Academic Honors:

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 has been invited and given multiple Plenary Talks at international conferences. 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 Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM and SIAM.