Xiao Ma’s Homepage
👋 About Me
I recently received my PhD in Computer Science from the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, where I was supervised by Prof. Dong MA and Prof. Baihua Zheng. I will join The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) as a Postdoctoral Fellow. I received my bachelor and master degrees at Beijing Institute of Technology supervised by Associate Professor Ronggang Cao from 2015-2019 and 2019-2022 respectively.
My research interests focus on mobile computing and pervasive sensing, with particular expertise in embedded machine learning (TinyML) which enables deep learning models on resource-constrained embedded devices.
🔬 Research Interests
• Embedded Machine Learning (TinyML)
• Test-Time Adaptation & Model Optimization
• User Authentication Systems
📰 Latest News
[2026] I received my PhD in Computer Science from Singapore Management University and will join HKUST as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
[2026] 📊 Our paper “PPG-Sport: A Dataset for Reliable Heart Rate Monitoring from Wrist PPG Under Dynamic Sports Conditions” is accepted by IMWUT.
[03/2026] 📄 Our paper “PulseLM: A Foundation Dataset and Benchmark for PPG-Text Learning” is released as a preprint.
[03/2026] 🎉 Our paper “Efficient Test-Time Adaptation via Decoupled BN Update For Edge Devices” is accepted by the 3rd Workshop on Test-Time Updates (TTU) @ ICLR 2026.
[01/2026] ✈️ I visited University of Cambridge as a Visiting PhD Student from January to May 2026.
[01/2026] 🎉 Our paper “Architecture-Agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment” is accepted by ICLR 2026!
[05/2025] 📄 Our paper “On-demand Test-time Adaptation for Edge Devices” is released as a preprint.
[04/2025] 📄 One paper accepted to IEEE TMC.
[03/2024] 🏆 Our paper won the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award in PerCom’24.
[02/2024] ✈️ I received IEEE TCPP Travel Grant for PerCom’24.
[12/2023] 📄 One paper accepted to PerCom’24.
🎓 Education
PhD in Computer Science (2022 - 2026)
Singapore Management University
Master in Ordnance Engineering (2019 - 2022)
Beijing Institute of Technology
Bachelor in Detection Guidance and Control Technology (2015 - 2019)
Beijing Institute of Technology
📚 Selected Publications
Architecture-Agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment
Xiao Ma, Young D. Kwon, Pan Zhou, Dong Ma
ICLR 2026 • Just Accepted!
[Code]
DiTMoS: Delving into Diverse Tiny-Model Selection on Microcontrollers
Xiao Ma, Shengfeng He, Hezhe Qiao, Dong Ma
PerCom 2024 • Mark Weiser Best Paper Award 🏆
[Paper] [Code] [Slides]
Towards Diverse Tiny-Model Selection for Microcontrollers
Xiao Ma, Shengfeng He, Hezhe Qiao, Dong Ma
IEEE TMC 2025
[Paper]
LR-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation of Implicit User Authentication on Earbuds
Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Xinger Huang, Yiran Shen, Dong Ma
IMWUT 2024 • Distinguished Paper Award 🏆
[Paper]
🏆 Honors & Awards
| 🏅 Academic Excellence • SMU Dean's List (2025) • SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship (2024, 2025) • PhD Full Scholarship, Singapore (2022) • National Scholarship, China (2021) | 🏆 Research Awards • Mark Weiser Best Paper Award (2024) • Distinguished Paper Award (2024) • IEEE TCPP Travel Grant (2024) |
🎯 Academic Service
📚 Teaching Assistant
• IS614 IoT: Technology and Applications (AY23/24)
• CS702: Computational Interaction (AY24/25)
📝 Reviewer
• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
• ICML 2026
• Percom 2026 Artifacts
💡 Interested in collaboration? Feel free to reach out via email or explore my work through the navigation menu above!