Jingtang Ma

I am a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where I focus on building large-scale deep learning inference and computer vision systems for Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and Amazon Go. Artificial general intelligence (AGI), brain-computer interfaces (BCI), and space exploration are the directions that have long fascinated me. Starting in 2026, I began channeling this passion into entrepreneurial ventures at the intersection of space commerce and AI.

Before joining Amazon, I earned my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During my graduate studies, I was a Research Assistant at Prof. Kaiyu Guan’s lab and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Kaiyu Guan and Prof. Sheng Wang. My research focused on deep learning applications in agriculture and remote sensing, particularly geographic correction and image segmentation methods based on satellite and hyperspectral imagery.

I also worked as a Machine Learning Researcher at the Sunstella Foundation, led by Dr. Jimeng Sun and Dr. Cao (Danica) Xiao, where I was mentored by Zifeng Wang and Zhen Lin. There, my work revolved around AI for healthcare, clinical trial data generation, few-shot learning, and brain-computer interfaces. Together with my mentors, I helped design and develop a comprehensive Python package for AI-driven clinical trial optimization, with a particular focus on generating tabular trial records using GaussianCopula, CopulaGAN, MedGAN, and CTGAN. In addition, to address the scarcity of target-domain data, we proposed deep learning methods for few-shot domain transfer on EEG data, aiming to predict and classify patient signals such as LPDs, GPDs, and seizures — replacing the standard predictor with a similarity-based classifier, and leveraging a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE)-based classifier.

I earned my undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC), with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics, Summa Cum Laude.

I grew up in Lanzhou, Gansu, in what I like to call a “mixed” family — if you count having grandparents from Tianjin, Shandong, Shanghai, and Dalian as a form of diversity. That upbringing gave me a lasting love for exploration. When I’m not working, you can probably find me scuba diving, skiing, hiking, or backpacking somewhere unfamiliar. As an avid photographer, I’m especially drawn to capturing the raw beauty of natural landscapes and wildlife.