Ning Ma

Dr. Ning Ma is a Lecturer in Medical Computing at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, with a dual appointment as an Academic Directorate of Medical Imaging and Medical Physics at the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He holds a PhD in hearing-inspired automatic speech processing from the University of Sheffield and earned his first degree in Computer Science from South China University of Technology.

• Member of Pervasive Computing and Speech and Hearing research groups
• Research Theme Co-Director for Healthcare Data/AI at the Insigneo Institute

His research focuses on speech and hearing technologies applied to healthcare, particularly in developing AI systems for acoustic monitoring of sleep-disordered breathing and respiratory diseases. He pioneers methods for interpreting sounds and low-cost sensor data to screen conditions like obstructive sleep apnea and tuberculosis through multimodal machine learning. His recent work explores music AI and its intersection with mental health.

Dr. Ma has led grants totaling over £500,000 from UKRI, MRC, EPSRC, and Innovate UK, including projects like AI-Enabled Cough Sound Analysis for TB Screening and SOMNUS: Sleep Monitoring by Unobtrusive Sensors. He serves on the Technical Programme Committee for INTERSPEECH and reviews for journals and funders. He is a member of the British Sleep Society, British Thoracic Society, and IEEE.

His publications (over 60 peer-reviewed papers) explore topics such as deep learning for sleep apnea screening, binaural sound localization, and noise-robust speech recognition. Notable collaborations include work with Guy Brown on home-based OSA detection and with Tu Zhen on hearing aid optimization using differentiable hearing loss models.