Chenhao Ma
Assistant Professor
School of Data Science
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
machenhao (at) cuhk.edu.cn
Bio
Dr. Chenhao Ma is an Assistant Professor and a Presidential Young Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD degree from Department of Computer Science in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2021, advised by Prof. Reynold Cheng. He once was a visiting student in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 2019, working with Prof. Xuemin Lin. Till now, he has published more than 60 papers in the areas of database and data mining, including one of four Best of SIGMOD2020 (a world flagship conference in database areas, 4/458), and most of them were published in top-tier conferences and journals (e.g., SIGMOD, PVLDB, KDD, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, VLDBJ, TKDE, and TODS). He was awarded the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award 2021. He has served as an area chair for NeurIPS, ICLR, and KDD, a senior PC member for AAAI, CIKM, and PAKDD, a PC member for SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and WWW, and a reviewer for top journals such as TKDE and VLDBJ.
News
I am looking for highly self-motivated PhD/MPhil students, PostDocs, and research assistants. If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to drop me an email. Please check the position info.
Chenhao was awarded a 2026 General Program grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for the project Structural Characterization, Evolution Mechanisms, and Closed-Loop Regulation of Information Cocoons in Multi-Topic Social Networks.
Chenhao was awarded the 2026 CCF-Ant Research Fund for Artificial Intelligence in June 2026.
My PhD student Yuyang Liang was selected for the 2026 Tencent Rhino-Bird Elite Talent Program.
Our open-source project MicroWorld, a lightweight system for multi-modal event analysis and social simulation, is released.
Chenhao was awarded the 2026 Tencent Weixin Rhino-Bird Special Research Fund in April 2026.
Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection of data management, data mining, and data-centric AI, with a focus on:
Graph Data Management & Analytics: dense subgraph discovery and search, shortest path and graph querying, motif analysis and counting, graph learning, mining over dynamic and heterogeneous graphs, and graph-grounded social simulation as in MicroWorld.
Data-Centric AI & LLM Systems: LLMs for structured data interaction and reasoning, including text-to-SQL, dataset search, and multi-turn tabular analysis, as well as AI-oriented data systems and tools such as vector search and table reconstruction.
Spatio-Temporal & Sequential Data Intelligence: traffic trajectory mining and retrieval, clinical event modeling, event sequence learning, and spatio-temporal analytics over real-world dynamic data.