On January 24, 2024, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the results of their selection process, and Professor Ma Weiying, the Chief Scientist of the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) at Tsinghua University, was elected as an ACM Fellow. This prestigious recognition honors his outstanding leadership and contributions in the field of web search and data mining within computer science.
Wei-Ying Ma is a Huiyan Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and the Chief Scientist at Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), which he co-founded with Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang in 2020. Currently, he is leading a team of faculties to work on AI for Science, with a particular focus on AI-powered drug discovery and generative AI for biology and chemistry. In addition, he has co-founded Helixon, a startup aimed at developing next-generation AI for antibody design and protein therapeutics discovery. From 2021-2023, he served as the Director of Health Computing Research Center with Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI).
Wei-Ying Ma is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has published more than 300 papers and has been granted with 169 patents. In the past, he has served as a program co-chair of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW) 2008 and the general co-chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2011. He has also served on many editorial boards, including ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) from 2005-2012, the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal from 2004-2012, and the Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications from 1998-2004. Additionally, Wei-Ying Ma was a member of International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee from 2010-2016, responsible for the publicity and organization of the conference in different countries and locations.
Prior to joining Tsinghua University, Wei-Ying Ma was a Vice President and the Head of AI Lab at ByteDance. He founded ByteDance AI Lab in 2017 and was responsible for research and technology development in areas including machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, speech and audio processing, recommender system and search. He led ByteDance AI Lab to develop various AI-powered content creation and content dissemination technologies and systems which have been integrated into ByteDance's products including Douyin, TikTok, Jinri Toutiao, CapCut and Lark. Wei-Ying Ma and his teams made an important contribution to the phenomenal success of Douyin and TikTok, which have revolutionized how people create and share content from their mobile phones through AI technology. As of 2023, TikTok has reached over 1.1 billion monthly active users globally and Douyin has over 700 million daily active users in China. These products have reshaped the landscape of the Internet industry.
