Yi Ma is on the board of Cheetah Mobile, Inc. and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Fellow at The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, Inc. and Fellow at Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

In the past Yi Ma held the position of Manager-Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, Professor at Shanghaitech University and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois At Urbana–Champaign.

He received an undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University and a graduate degree and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.