Ma received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees all in computer science from the University of Utah in 1986, 1988, and 1993, respectively. During 1993-1999, Ma was a staff scientist at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA Langley Research Center, where he conducted research in scientific visualization and high-performance computing. Ma joined UC Davis faculty in July 1999 and funded the Visualization and Interface Design Innovation (VIDI) research group and UC Davis Center of Excellence for Visualization.
Ma is a leading researcher in Big Data visualization. He organized the NSF/DOE Workshop on Large Scientific and Engineering Data Visualization (with C. Johnson) in 1999 as well as the Panel on Visualizing Large Datasets: Challenges and Opportunities at ACM SIGGRAPH 1999. He participated in the NSF LSSDSV, ITR, and BigData programs, and led the DOE SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization, a five-year, multi-institution project. He and his students has convincingly demonstrated several advanced concepts for data visualization, such as in situ visualization (1995, 2006), visualization provenance (1999), hardware accelerated volume visualization (2001), machine learning assisted volume visualization (2004), explorable images (2010), machine learning assisted graph visualization (2017), etc. Ma has published over 400 articles and given over 300 invited talks.
Ma has been actively serving the research community by playing leading roles in several professional activities including VizSec, Ultravis, EGPGV, IEEE VIS, IEEE PacificVis, and IEEE LDAV. He has served as a papers co-chair for SciVis, InfoVis, EuroVis, PacificVis, and Graph Drawing. Professor Ma was associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2007-2011), IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2007-2019), and the Journal of Computational Science and Discovery (2009-2014). He presently serves on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, the Journal of Visual Informatics, and the Journal Computational Visual Media.
Ma is a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS).[1]
Supernova visualization made by Eric Lum (2003) for scientific storytelling with data provided by the Terascale Supernova Initiative.Movie storytelling with storyline visualization, designed by Yuzuru Takahashi (2012).An interactive visualization exhibit, the Plankton Table (2012), on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Awards
1999 NSF CAREER Award
2000 NSF Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE)[2]
2001 Schlumberger Foundation Technical Award
2007 UC Davis College of Engineering's Outstanding Mid-Career Research Faculty Award
2008, 2009, 2012 HP Labs Research Innovation Award
Chris Bryan, Gregory Guterman, Kwan-Liu Ma, Harris A. Lewin, Denis M. Larkin, Jaebum Kim, Jian Ma, Marta Farre: Synteny Explorer: An Interactive Visualization Application for Teaching Genome Evolution. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 23(1): 711-720 (2017)
Oh-Hyun Kwon, Chris Muelder, Kyungwon Lee, Kwan-Liu Ma: A Study of Layout, Rendering, and Interaction Methods for Immersive Graph Visualization. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 22(7): 1802-1815 (2016)
Yuzuru Tanahashi, Chien-Hsin Hsueh, Kwan-Liu Ma: An Efficient Framework for Generating Storyline Visualizations from Streaming Data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 21(6): 730-742 (2015)
Carlos D. Correa, Tarik Crnovrsanin, Kwan-Liu Ma: Visual Reasoning about Social Networks Using Centrality Sensitivity. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 18(1): 106-120 (2012)
Joyce Ma, Isaac Liao, Kwan-Liu Ma, Jennifer Frazier: Living Liquid: Design and Evaluation of an Exploratory Visualization Tool for Museum Visitors. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 18(12): 2799-2808 (2012)
Wei-Hsien Hsu, Kwan-Liu Ma, Carlos D. Correa: A rendering framework for multiscale views of 3D models. ACM Trans. Graph. 30(6): 131 (2011)
Anna Tikhonova, Carlos D. Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma: Visualization by Proxy: A Novel Framework for Deferred Interaction with Volume Data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 16(6): 1551-1559 (2010)
Carlos D. Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma: Dynamic video narratives. ACM Trans. Graph. 29(4): 88:1-88:9 (2010)
Fan-Yin Tzeng, Eric B. Lum, Kwan-Liu Ma: An Intelligent System Approach to Higher-Dimensional Classification of Volume Data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 11(3): 273-284 (2005)
Eric B. Lum, Kwan-Liu Ma, John P. Clyne: A Hardware-Assisted Scalable Solution for Interactive Volume Rendering of Time-Varying Data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 8(3): 286-301 (2002)
T. J. Jankun-Kelly, Kwan-Liu Ma: Visualization Exploration and Encapsulation via a Spreadsheet-Like Interface. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 7(3): 275-287 (2001)
Kwan-Liu Ma, James S. Painter, Charles D. Hansen, Michael Krogh: Parallel volume rendering using binary-swap compositing. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 14(4): 59-68 (1994)
