Wei-Chiu Ma

Wei-Chiu Ma is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he leads research at the intersection of 3D/4D computer vision and robotics. His work focuses on building AI systems that can understand, reconstruct, and re-simulate our dynamic world to enable more robust autonomous systems and advance entertainment applications.

Prior to joining Cornell, Dr. Ma was a Young Investigator/Postdoc at AI2 / University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, working with Antonio Torralba and Raquel Urtasun. Before his Ph.D., he was a Senior Research Scientist at Uber ATG R&D and Waabi working on self-driving vehicles, and completed his M.S. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University under the advisement of Kris M. Kitani.

Dr. Ma's research interests span several interconnected areas in computer vision and robotics:

• 3D/4D Computer Vision: Focused on scene reconstruction, modeling, and understanding from visual inputs
• Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF): Developing techniques for novel view synthesis and scene representation
• Robotics and Simulation: Creating realistic sensor simulation for autonomous systems
• Digital Twins: Building interactive, game-engine compatible virtual environments
• Self-Driving Technology: Working on scene flow estimation, sensor simulation, and vehicle localization

His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on pushing the boundaries of 3D scene understanding, with particular emphasis on extreme-view geometry, neural rendering techniques, and creating realistic simulations for autonomous systems. His work often bridges theoretical computer vision with practical applications in robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Ma has received several notable recognitions including being selected as a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) rising star and a Siebel Scholar. He has also earned the Best Application Award for his work on TDTOS: T-Shirt Design and Try On System.

As an educator and mentor, Dr. Ma is actively involved in guiding the next generation of researchers. He hosts pro bono office hours for students from underrepresented groups and is committed to fostering diversity in the field. He is currently building his research group at Cornell and plans to hire 1-2 graduate students during the 2024-25 cycle.

Dr. Ma has organized several influential workshops including the "Synthetic Data for Computer Vision" workshop at CVPR 2025, the "Agent in Interaction, from Humans to Robots" workshop at CVPR 2025, and the "3D Modeling, Reconstruction, and Generation in the Wild" workshop at ECCV 2024, demonstrating his leadership in the computer vision community.