Professor Ma Wei-ying is currently the Chief of AI and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science (HKAI-Sci) at City University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Bachelor of Engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan China in 1990, followed by his Master’s and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1994 and 1997 respectively. Professor Ma’s research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI for Biology and Life Sciences, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Search and Data Mining.
Beyond CityUHK, Professor Ma is the Huiyan Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and Chief Scientist at the Institute for AI Industry Research. Professor Ma previously served as the Director of the Health Computing Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (2021 – 2023) and the Vice President and Head of the AI Lab at ByteDance (2017 – 2020), where he led the development of multiple AI-driven content creation and distribution technologies which were successfully implemented in products such as TikTok, Douyin, Toutiao, CapCut and Lark. From 2009 to 2017, he was the Managing Deputy Director at Microsoft Research Asia, leading teams to develop multiple technologies integrated into Microsoft Bing search and other core products, focusing on web search and data mining, natural language computation, machine learning, social computing, and urban computing.
Professor Ma is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2025, he was recognised among the top 2% of the world’s most highly cited scientists, according to metrics compiled by Stanford University. Professor Ma has published over 340 papers in top-tier conferences and journals and holds more than 160 technical patents.