Kevin Ma

Kevin Ma first started doing research when he realized how bad of a tennis player he was. After COVID made private tennis coaching temporarily unavailable, he decided to try to engineer a small sensor that could hook onto your tennis racket and use machine learning algorithms on live data to become an accurate tennis “coach.” After months in the engineering process: Building the sensor, collecting data, and creating physics based neural network algorithms that operated on the data, Kevin completed two working prototypes. One for tennis, and another for table tennis. He published his work in national and international IEEE journals and presented his work at conferences in Irvine and Slovakia.

Kevin has also worked in the area of systems biology. He worked in Professor Chaolin Zhang’s lab at Columbia University to model unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) for accurate tag counting in deep sequencing experiments. He worked in Linux with large datasets to generate a working machine learning model to de-duplicate UMIs in UMI and CLIP collapsing.

In his junior and senior year, Kevin worked at Toyon Research Corporation as a machine learning engineer. He developed two different working machine learning models for Real Satellite Image Data with high classification precision that could identify: 1. Building damage before and after natural disasters. and 2. Different types of Roof Shapes. Kevin also developed a full data parsing pipeline for generating annotation files from both Binary Masks and Polygon XML annotations. He handled data processing and generating scripts and algorithms in MATLAB and Python.

In high school, Kevin was heavily involved in the National Honors Society, which he led as president of his chapter for two years. He partnered with the USPS to organize a gift drive that donated hundreds of gifts across the nation to kids who might not otherwise receive Christmas gifts. He also organized a homeless care package food drive where he partnered with a local homeless shelter to make specialized “care packages” for the homeless population.

In his free time, Kevin loves to play pickup basketball and read manga. He sometimes does work as an independent manga translator and printer to get hard copies of manga that is either online-exclusive or not yet been translated into english. Kevin is a dog person because he owns a cat.