About

About

profile

My name is MA Yiran (马义然), and I go by Yiran Rex Ma in papers. Call me Yiran or Rex per your liking :)

I’m with PKU-ByteDance Digital Humanities Open Laboratory (PKUDH) in Peking University, working on Multi-Modal Intelligence on cultural heritage.

Coming in September 2026, I’m going to be admitted to Peking Univeristy as an MA majoring in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, supervised by Prof. SU Qi. My concentration is/will be on computational linguistics, specifically human-machine information structure asymmetry between English and Chinese.

Currently, I’m a senior BA in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), majoring in English, Linguistics and Language Technologies with a minor in Data Science and Big Data Technologies. Before that, I was primarily trained in the humanities with a discovered and ever since ongoing passion for human languages.

From September 2024 to August 2025, I was a research intern in both Legal AI and Computational Paleography subdivisions in TsinghuaNLP, working around multi-agent court simulation, legalese generation evaluation, and graph-based oracle bone inscription (OBI) processing.

My current scope is: AI Data Governance:

Aside from being increasingly proficient “sense-making machines” on formal levels, AIs fall short of what cannot be modeled intuitively at present, namely, agency/subjectivity, knowledge, experience, emotion, culture, … Moreover, pain, gap, imperfection, … Therefore, I aspire to engage in attempts at:

  • Self-supervised data curation
  • Synthesization and augmentation
  • “Super” representation and alignment
  • …

All serving full modality, large scale continous training and reinforcement learning.

While this may sound far-fetched, “if you don’t live in the future today, you will live in the past tomorrow”. I will keep making my contribution through consistent, bit-by-bit action. Even baby steps matter!

…and I’m a language aficionado! American English and Simplified Chinese are my primary working languages, while I was born and raised with Sichuan Dialect as my mother tone and Mandarin Chinese my first language. Besides, I’m currently on track for Spanish, French, and Traditional Chinese. Hopefully I will become a polyglot :)

This is an academic/personal profile/blog, where I update news and whimsical thoughts. Enjoy!