Hao Ma

Facebook AI

About Me

I am currently a Director at Facebook AI. Before that, I was a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC), Microsoft Research at Redmond, USA. My interests, in no particular order, include Natural Language Understanding, Machine Learning, Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval. I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I have worked on many challenging problems in understanding content as well as making search more semantic, including (1) designed the state-of-the-art AI solutions to detect harmful content and keep people safe on the Web; (2) invented the core Knowledge Graph algorithms that powered Bing's entity experience, e.g., Entity Recommendation, Attributes Ranking, Relationship Interpretation, Exploration, Carousel Ranking; (3) architected the Question and Answering effort which fundamentally shaped Bing into a semantic search engine; (4) constructed the world's largest Scientific Knowledge Base with a team of applied and data scientists, which powered Microsoft's Academic and Patent Search Engine.

News

[Nov. 2019] Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer highlighted how our group's AI techniques greatly helped Facebook detect harmful content and make Facebook a much safer place. More coverage at The Wall Street Journal and VentureBeat.

[Feb. 2018] Our recent research on Network Embedding was covered by Microsoft Research Blog "Microsoft researchers unlock the black box of network embedding".

[Aug. 2017] My previous intern Yuxiao Dong won the SIGKDD 2017 Dissertation Award. Big congratulations to Yuxiao!

[Nov. 2016] Nature featured the Microsoft Academic product we released in an article highlighting semantic search engines "AI science search engines expand their reach".

[Aug. 2016] I organized KDD Cup 2016 at KDD 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA.

[Aug. 2016] My previous intern Huan Sun won the SIGKDD 2016 Dissertation Award. Big congratulations to Huan!

[Jul. 2016] I delivered a tutorial "Question Answering with Knowledge Bases, Web and Beyond" at SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Italy.

[Jun. 2016] I delivered a tutorial "Question Answering with Knowledge Bases, Web and Beyond" at NAACL HLT 2016, San Diego, CA, USA.

[May. 2016] The second largest Chinese search engine Sogou partnered with us and lauched Sogou Academic to all Chinese users. See news at technode and The Washington Post.

[Nov. 2015] I delivered a tutorial "An Introduction to Entity Recommendation and Understanding" at ACML 2015, Hong Kong.

[May. 2015] I delivered a tutorial "An Introduction to Entity Recommendation and Understanding" at WWW 2015, Florence, Italy.

Selected Publications

– Tutorial and Invited Talk

Tutorial: “Question Answering with Knowledge Bases, Web and Beyond”. The 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2016), Pisa, Italy, Jul. 12-17, 2016.

Tutorial: “Question Answering with Knowledge Bases, Web and Beyond”. The 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL HLT 2016), San Diego, California, USA, Jun. 12-17, 2016.

Tutorial: “An Introduction to Entity Recommendation and Understanding”. The 7th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2015), Hong Kong, Nov. 20-22, 2015.

Tutorial: “An Introduction to Entity Recommendation and Understanding”. The 24th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015), Florence, Italy, May 18-22, 2015.

Invited talk. “Entity Recommendation and Understanding”. The Second Workshop on Vertical Search Relevance, at WSDM 2015, Shanghai, China, Feb. 02-06, 2015.

Invited talk: “Learning to Recommend with Social Information”. The Eighth ICSA International Conference: Frontiers of Interdisciplinary and Methodological Statistical Research (ICSA 2010), Guangzhou, China, Dec. 19-22, 2010.

Tutorial: “Introduction to Social Recommendation”. The 19th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010), Raleigh, North Carolina USA, April 26-30, 2010.

– Preprints

( * ) represents interns who worked with me.

Jiezhong Qiu *, Hao Ma, Omer Levy, Scott Wen-tau Yih, Sinong Wang and Jie Tang. Blockwise Self-Attention for Long Document Understanding. [PDF]

Jiezhong Qiu *, Hao Ma, Yuxiao Dong, Kuansan Wang and Jie Tang. Revisiting Knowledge Base Embedding as Tensor Decomposition. [PDF]

Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Jie Tang and Kuansan Wang. Collaboration Diversity and Scientific Impact. [PDF]

– Conference

( * ) represents interns who worked with me.

Jiezhong Qiu *, Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Jian Li, Chi Wang, Kuansan Wang and Jie Tang. NetSMF: Large-Scale Network Embedding as Sparse Matrix Factorization. In Proceedings of the 30th The Web Conference (WWW 2019), San Francisco, California, USA, May 13-17, 2019.

Jiani Zhang *, Xingjian Shi, Junyuan Xie, Hao Ma, Irwin King and Dit-Yan Yeung. GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs. In Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2018), Monterey, California, USA, August 06-10, 2018. [arXiv]

Jiezhong Qiu *, Jian Tang, Hao Ma, Yuxiao Dong, Kuansan Wang and Jie Tang. DeepInf: Social Influence Prediction with Deep Learning. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2018), London, UK, August 19-23, 2018. [PDF]

Zhihong Shen, Hao Ma, and Kuansan Wang. A Web-Scale System for Scientific Knowledge Exploration. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), Melbourne, Australia, July 15-20, 2018. [System Demo]

Jiezhong Qiu *, Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Jian Li, Kuansan Wang and Jie Tang. Network Embedding as Matrix Factorization: Unifying DeepWalk, LINE, PTE, and node2vec. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2018), Los Angeles, California, USA, Feb. 5-9, 2018. [arXiv]

Yuxiao Dong *, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen and Kuansan Wang. A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2017), Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, August 13-17, 2017. [arXiv]

Hao Ma, Xueqing Liu *, and Zhihong Shen. User Fatigue in Online News Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016), Montreal, Canada, April 11-15, 2016.

Huan Sun *, Hao Ma, Xiaodong He, Wen-tau Yih, Yu Su, and Xifeng Yan. Table Cell Search for Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016), Montreal, Canada, April 11-15, 2016.

Huan Sun *, Hao Ma, Wen-tau Yih, Chen-Tse Tsai, Jingjing Liu and Ming-Wei Chang. Open Domain Question Answering via Semantic Enrichment. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015), Florence, Italy, May 18-22, 2015.

Arnab Sinha, Zhihong Shen, Yang Song, Hao Ma, Darrin Eide, Bo-June Paul Hsu, and Kuansan Wang. An Overview of Microsoft Academic Service (MAS) and Applications. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015), Florence, Italy, May 18-22, 2015.

Bin Bi *, Hao Ma, Paul Hsu, Wei Chu, Kuansan Wang and Junghoo Cho. Learning to Recommend Related Entities to Search Users. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2015), Shanghai, China, Feb. 2-6, 2015.

Hao Ma. On Measuring Social Friend Interest Similarities in Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2014), Gold Coast, Australia, Jul. 6 – 11, 2014. [PDF]

Ming-Wei Chang, Bo-June Hsu, Hao Ma, Ricky Loynd, Kuansan Wang. E2E: An End-to-end Entity Linking System for Short and Noisy Text. #Microposts2014 NEEL Challenge, WWW 2014, Seoul, Korea, Apr. 7-11, 2014.

Xiao Yu *, Hao Ma, Paul Hsu and Jiawei Han. On Building Entity Recommender Systems Using User Click Log and Freebase Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2014), New York City, NY, USA, Feb. 24-28, 2014.

Hao Ma. An Experimental Study on Implicit Social Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2013), Dublin, Ireland, Jul. 28th – Aug. 1st, 2013.

Yang Song, Hao Ma, Hongning Wang, and Kuansan Wang. Exploring and Exploiting User Search Behavior on Mobile and Tablet Devices to Improve Search Relevance. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2013), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 13- 17, 2013.

Wujie Zheng, Hao Ma, M.R. Lyu, Tao Xie and Irwin King. Mining Test Oracles of Web Search Engines. In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kan., US, November 6-10, 2011.

Jianke Zhu, Hao Ma, Chun Chen and Jiajun Bu. Social Recommendation Using Low-Rank Semidefinite Program. In Proceedings of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2011), San Francisco, CA, USA, Aug. 7-11, 2011.

Hao Ma, Chao Liu, Irwin King and Michael R. Lyu. Probabilistic Factor Models for Web Site Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2011), Beijing, China, Jul. 24-28, 2011.

Hao Ma, Dengyong Zhou, Chao Liu, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King. Recommender Systems with Social Regularization. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2011), Hong Kong, Feb. 09-12, 2011. [Test of Time Award at WSDM 2022]

Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King. Diversifying Query Suggestion Results. In Proceedings of the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2010), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 11–15, 2010.

Tom Chao Zhou, Hao Ma, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. UserRec: A User Recommendation Framework in Social Tagging Systems. In Proceedings of the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2010), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 11–15, 2010.

Hao Ma, Raman Chandrasekar, Chris Quirk, Abhishek Gupta. Improving Search Engines Using Human Computation Games. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), Hong Kong, China, November 2-6, 2009.

Hao Ma, Haixuan Yang, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. Semi-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Global Statistical Consistency in Collaborative Filtering. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), Hong Kong, China, November 2-6, 2009.

Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King. Learning to Recommend with Trust and Distrust Relationships. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2009), New York City, NY, USA, October 22-25, 2009.

Hao Ma, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. Learning to Recommend with Social Trust Ensemble. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), Boston, MA, USA, July 19-23, 2009. [Test of Time Award at SIGIR 2020]

Hao Ma, Raman Chandrasekar, Chris Quirk, Abhishek Gupta. Page Hunt: Improving Search Engines Using Human Computation Games. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2009), Boston, MA, USA, July 19-23, 2009.

Hao Ma, Haixuan Yang, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King. SoRec: Social Recommendation Using Probabilistic Matrix Factorization. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), pages 931-940, Napa Valley, California USA, October 26-30, 2008. [Test of Time Award at CIKM 2019]

Hao Ma, Haixuan Yang, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. Learning Latent Semantic Relations from Clickthrough Data for Query Suggestion. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), pages 709-718, Napa Valley, California USA, October 26-30, 2008.

Hao Ma, Haixuan Yang, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King. Mining Social Networks Using Heat Diffusion Processes for Marketing Candidates Selection. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008), pages 233-242, Napa Valley, California USA, October 26-30, 2008.

Hao Ma, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. Effective Missing Data Prediction for Collaborative Filtering. Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), pages 39-46, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, July 23-27, 2007.

– Journal

Hao Ma, Irwin King and Michael R. Lyu. “Learning to Recommend with Explicit and Implicit Social Relations”. To appear in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2011.

Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu and Irwin King. “Improving Recommender Systems by Incorporating Social Contextual Information”, To appear in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2011.

Hao Ma, Irwin King and Michael R. Lyu. “Mining Web Graphs for Recommendations”. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering (TKDE), 2011.

Hao Ma, Jacky Zhu, Michael R. Lyu and Irwin King. Bridging the Semantic Gap between Image Contents and Tags. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 462-473, August 2010.

Zibin Zheng, Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu, and Irwin King. Web Service QoS Prediction by Collaborative Filtering. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), 2010.

Media Coverage

– Content Understanding

New progress in using AI to detect harmful content, Facebook AI Blog, Nov. 2019.

Facebook Reports Gains in Removing Objectionable Content, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2019.

Facebook now detects 80% of hate speech proactively, VentureBeat, Nov. 2019.

– Semantic Scholar Search

AI Science Search Engines Expand Their Reach, Nature, Nov. 2016.

Sogou, Bing unite for 'bigger world' searches, The Washington Post, May 2016.

Sogou Buddies Up With Microsoft's Bing To Power English Search, technode, May 2016.

The next phase of Microsoft Academic: intelligent bots at your service!, Microsoft Research Blog, May 2016.

How Microsoft plans to give Cortana more brain power than anything Siri can muster, BGR, Jul. 2014.

Making Cortana the Researcher's Dream Assistant, Microsoft Research Blog, Jul. 2014.

– Entity and Knowledge Graph

Expand Your Understanding with Bing, Bing Blogs, Dec. 2013.

Understand Your World with Bing, Bing Blogs, Mar. 2013.

– Search and Human Computation

Microsoft Game Helps Make Search Better, MIT Technology Review, July 2009.

Microsoft Bing Could Be Improved with Online Game, eWeek, July 2009.

Page Hunt game could help Bing search results, Ars Technica, July 2009.

Microsoft Hopes To Improve Bing With Page Hunt Game, Search Engine Land, July 2009.

Play Page Hunt, a Bing Human Computation Game, SoftPedia, July 2009.

Contact

I can be reached at FirstnameLastname @ haoma.io