Portrait
Dong Ma
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Technology
University of Cambridge, UK
Fellow of Queens' College
About Me

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Computing Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. I am also a Fellow at Queens' College. Before joining Cambridge, I was an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Prior to that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, advised by Prof. Cecilia Mascolo. I earned my PhD at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia in 2019, supervised by Prof. Mahbub Hassan and Prof. Wen Hu. I also worked as a Research Assistant at DATA61-CSIRO, Australia from 2016 to 2019. I had my bachelor degree and master study in Communication Engineering at Central South University, China, from 2010 to 2016.

Appointments
  • University of Cambridge
    University of Cambridge
    Associate Professor
    Jan. 2026 -
  • Singapore Management University
    Singapore Management University
    Assistant Professor
    Jan. 2022 - Dec. 2025
  • University of Cambridge
    University of Cambridge
    Research Associate
    Jan. 2020 - Dec. 2021
Research Topics
  • Wearable Computing
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Physiological Foundation Models
  • Embedded Machine Learning
  • Spiking Neural Networks
News
2026
I will be serving on the TPC of MobiCom'26 winter cycle.
Feb 18
PEA was accepted at ICLR'26! Congratulations to Xiao and all co-authors!
Jan 26
BAIT was accepted at CHI'26! Congratulations to all co-authors!
Jan 16
2025
EarCalo was accepted at HotMobile'26! Congrats to Yang!
Dec 17
One paper accepted at Nature Communications! Congrats to Kayla!
Dec 15
DeWater was accepted at INFOCOM’26! Congrats to Yuezhong!
Dec 08
Congrats to Changshuo and Manh who for their work Cheap2Chic accepted at SenSys’26!
Nov 11
Congrats to Changshuo who received the Distinguished Paper Award at UbiComp’25!
Oct 20
Congrats to Changshuo and Manh who received the Best Paper Award at BodySys'25!
Oct 20
Congrats to Manh who received the Best Oral Presentation Award at the Second Singapore-China Joint-Symposium on AI & Sustainability 2025!
Sep 30
EarMeter and HearForce were accepted at IMWUT! Congrats to Yang and Qiang!
Sep 19
I will be serving as the Vice-General Chair at MobiSys'26. Looking forward to seeing you in Cambridge, UK!
Jul 18
Q-HEART was accepted at ECAI’25. Congrats to Manh!
Jul 11
Congrats to Xiao who was awarded the 2025-2026 Dean's List at SCIS, SMU!!
Jul 07
Congrats to all my PhD students Xiao, Manh, and Changshuo who won the 2025-2026 SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship in Computing. Well done!!
Jul 06
I will be serving as a TPC member at SenSys’26, WWW’26.
Jun 27
I will be serving as a TPC member of workshops including SmartWear@MobiCom 2025, IASA@MobiCom 2025, BodySys@UbiComp'25.
May 01
D-BETA was accepted at ICML’25. Congrats to Manh!
May 01
DiTMoS extension was accepted at TMC. Congrats to Xiao!
Apr 15
RespEar won the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at PerCom'25! Congratulations to all co-authors!
Mar 21
Selected Publications (view all )
Architecture-agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment
Architecture-agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment

Xiao Ma, Young D. Kwon, Pan Zhou, Dong Ma

14th International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026

Architecture-agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment

Xiao Ma, Young D. Kwon, Pan Zhou, Dong Ma

14th International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026

From Cheap to Chic: Enhancing Music Playback Quality of Budget Earphones via Hardware-Aware Learning
From Cheap to Chic: Enhancing Music Playback Quality of Budget Earphones via Hardware-Aware Learning

Changshuo Hu*, Hung Manh Pham*, Ting Dang, Jiannan Li, Rajesh Balan, Dong Ma (* equal contribution)

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Embedded Artificial Intelligence and Sensing Systems, 2026

From Cheap to Chic: Enhancing Music Playback Quality of Budget Earphones via Hardware-Aware Learning

Changshuo Hu*, Hung Manh Pham*, Ting Dang, Jiannan Li, Rajesh Balan, Dong Ma (* equal contribution)

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Embedded Artificial Intelligence and Sensing Systems, 2026

Reliable Wrist PPG Monitoring by Mitigating Poor Skin Sensor Contact
Reliable Wrist PPG Monitoring by Mitigating Poor Skin Sensor Contact

Hung Manh Pham, Matthew Yiwen Ho, Ignace De Lathauwer, Yiming Zhang, Dimitris Spathis, Aaqib Saeed, Dong Ma

Scientific Reports , 2025

Reliable Wrist PPG Monitoring by Mitigating Poor Skin Sensor Contact

Hung Manh Pham, Matthew Yiwen Ho, Ignace De Lathauwer, Yiming Zhang, Dimitris Spathis, Aaqib Saeed, Dong Ma

Scientific Reports , 2025

Boosting Masked ECG-Text Auto-Encoders as Discriminative Learners
Boosting Masked ECG-Text Auto-Encoders as Discriminative Learners

Manh Pham Hung, Aaqib Saeed, Dong Ma

Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025

Boosting Masked ECG-Text Auto-Encoders as Discriminative Learners

Manh Pham Hung, Aaqib Saeed, Dong Ma

Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025

RespEar: Earable-Based Robust Respiratory Rate Monitoring
RespEar: Earable-Based Robust Respiratory Rate Monitoring

Yang Liu*, Kayla-Jade Butkow*, Jake Stuchbury-Wass, Adam Pullin, Dong Ma, Cecilia Mascolo (* equal contribution)

23nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2025 Best Paper Award

RespEar: Earable-Based Robust Respiratory Rate Monitoring

Yang Liu*, Kayla-Jade Butkow*, Jake Stuchbury-Wass, Adam Pullin, Dong Ma, Cecilia Mascolo (* equal contribution)

23nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2025 Best Paper Award

LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds
LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds

Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Xinger Huang, Yiran Shen, Dong Ma

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2024 Distinguished Paper Award

LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds

Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Xinger Huang, Yiran Shen, Dong Ma

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2024 Distinguished Paper Award

BreathPro: Monitoring Breathing Mode during Running with Earables
BreathPro: Monitoring Breathing Mode during Running with Earables

Changshuo Hu, Thivya Kandappu, Yang Liu, Cecilia Mascolo, Dong Ma

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2024

BreathPro: Monitoring Breathing Mode during Running with Earables

Changshuo Hu, Thivya Kandappu, Yang Liu, Cecilia Mascolo, Dong Ma

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2024

DiTMoS: Delving into Diverse Tiny-Model Selection on Microcontrollers
DiTMoS: Delving into Diverse Tiny-Model Selection on Microcontrollers

Xiao Ma, Shengfeng He, Hezhe Qiao, Dong Ma

22nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2024 Best Paper Award

DiTMoS: Delving into Diverse Tiny-Model Selection on Microcontrollers

Xiao Ma, Shengfeng He, Hezhe Qiao, Dong Ma

22nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2024 Best Paper Award

ClearSpeech: Improving Voice Quality of Earbuds Using Both In-Ear and Out-Ear Microphones
ClearSpeech: Improving Voice Quality of Earbuds Using Both In-Ear and Out-Ear Microphones

Dong Ma, Ting Dang, Ming Ding, Rajesh Balan

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2023

ClearSpeech: Improving Voice Quality of Earbuds Using Both In-Ear and Out-Ear Microphones

Dong Ma, Ting Dang, Ming Ding, Rajesh Balan

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2023

OESense: Employing Occlusion Effect for In-ear Human Sensing
OESense: Employing Occlusion Effect for In-ear Human Sensing

Dong Ma, Andrea Ferlini, Cecilia Mascolo

19th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, 2021

OESense: Employing Occlusion Effect for In-ear Human Sensing

Dong Ma, Andrea Ferlini, Cecilia Mascolo

19th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, 2021

SolarGest: Ubiquitous and Energy-free Gesture Recognition using Solar Cells
SolarGest: Ubiquitous and Energy-free Gesture Recognition using Solar Cells

Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Mushfika Baishakhi Upama, Ashraf Uddin, Moustafa Youssef

25th ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2019

SolarGest: Ubiquitous and Energy-free Gesture Recognition using Solar Cells

Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Mushfika Baishakhi Upama, Ashraf Uddin, Moustafa Youssef

25th ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2019

All publications