Professor Ma received his B.E. degree (electronic engineering) from Chung Yuan Christian University, Chung-Li, Taiwan, R.O.C., the M.S. degree (electrical engineering) from Duke University, Durham, NC, U.S.A. and the Ph.D. degree (electrical engineering) from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, U.S.A.

Dr. Ma is now full Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he began his academic career in 1995 as a lecturer and then promoted to senior lecturer (1997), associate professor (1999), and full professor (2005). Concurrently, he has been serving as Programme Director of Master of Science (Signal Processing; 2002~2006), and Deputy Director, Centre for Signal Processing (2003~now). From 1992 to 1995, he was a Member of Technical Staff at the Institute of Microelectronics, National University of Singapore, working on digital video coding and the MPEG standards. From 1984 to 1992, he was working in IBM Corporation at Kingston, NY, and then Research Triangle Park, NC, U.S.A. as engineer and engaging on various DSP and VLSI advanced product development. He is Singapore MPEG Chairman and Head of Delegation (1997-2001). On the MPEG contributions, two fast motion estimation algorithms (Diamond Search and MVFAST) produced from his research group have been adopted by the MPEG-4 standard, as the reference core technology for fast motion estimation. He is the General Chair of organizing a series of international standard meetings (MPEG and JPEG), JPEG2000 and MPEG-7 workshops held in Singapore (2001).

Professor Ma is Technical Program Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2004. He is currently serving as Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, as well as Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Image and Graphics and the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. He is an elected Technical Committee Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP), the IEEE Communications Society Multimedia Communications Committee, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Digital Signal Processing. He has been serving as Technical Program Committee member, reviewer and Session Chair of multiple IEEE international conferences. He is Chairman of IEEE Signal Processing Singapore Chapter (2000-2002). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.