About me
Greetings, my name is Jiechao Ma, currently holding the position of Senior Researcher at Deepwise Inc. (Beijing), a medical imaging AI startup. I am privileged to participate in the Frontiers Science Center for Disease-related Molecular Network Programme, an initiative that was honored with the Second Prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2020. In the course of my engagement with this program, I collaborate closely with Prof. Yizhou Yu from The University of Hong Kong, and Prof. Weimin Li, who serves as the President of West China Hospital Sichuan University-one of the most prestigious and well-respected medical institutions in China.
Prior to my affiliation with Deepwise Inc. (Beijing), I attained both my MSc and BEng degrees in Computer Science from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). During my academic journey at SYSU, I had the privilege of being under the mentorship of esteemed professors in their respective domains. Specifically, I was advised by Prof. Wei-Shi (Jason) Zheng, whose expertise lies in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) at Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Data and Computer Science. Additionally, I had the honor of working under the guidance of Prof. Yi Zhou, an authority in the field of medical sciences, based at Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Medicine.
My research endeavors at SYSU were dedicated to the intersection of deep learning and artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a particular focus on their applications in medical imaging, where I also delved into Person Re-identification (Re-ID) during my first two years of study. This research direction was chosen due to its profound implications for the healthcare domain, and I embarked on a journey to explore the transformative potential of these technologies in the realm of healthcare. In addition, my primary research interests extend to natural language processing and machine learning. I am passionately dedicated to investigating novel AI techniques, which serve as the driving force behind my quest to develop innovative healthcare applications for complex and fundamental problems. Recently, my research has been centered around several key areas, including:
General-purpose knowledge retrieval systems: This includes information-seeking question answering and retrieval and multi-modal multi-hop question answering based on multimodality large language models (LLMs) for specific clinical domain, such as Instruct-Retriever, MultiModalQA.
Efficient and adaptive NLP and CV models that more effectively integrate world clinical knowledge to deal with healthcare applications utilizing multimodal system(s) Multimodal Integration (MMI), Cross-View Relation.
Integrating deep learning with radiomics features enriches our approach by incorporating diverse pathological characteristics. This integration results in a multifaceted set of influential factors that significantly contribute to the classification, prognosis, and survival analysis of lung cancer patients with EGFR and PD-L1 Gene Mutation, Gene Expression.
Foundation Models that can perform a wide range of biomedical tasks including Medical Image Segmentation, 3D Medical Image Analysis, Context Fusion.
My research is driven by a desire to create healthcare systems that are both practical and impactful, with the ultimate goal of improving access to information for people from all walks of life.
News
- 2023.8: One paper working on Semi-supervised got accepted as oral presentation to MICCAI 2023.
- 2023.3: I gave a talk at The AI Talk on Adaptive and trustworthy NLP with retrieval.
- 2023.1: Our tutorial proposal on Retrieval-based Language Models and Applications is accepted by ACL 2023. Come to our tutorial!!
Research opportunities and office hours
- I am happy to mentor a few undergraduate / master students interested in NLP research. If you are a student at University of Washington, please fill out our group’s application for RA. Unfortunately, I’m at full capacity this summer.
- I am also hosting virtual office hours for those who want my advice/thoughts on NLP research, PhD applications, UW academic programs or any other topics of interest (this is open to anyone!). Please schedule via Calendly.
- I especially encourage students from underrepresented groups to reach out.