Yanting Ma

Yanting Ma
Yanting's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Yanting's research interests are mainly in algorithm design and analysis for inverse problems arising in computational sensing using statistical inference and optimization techniques. Additionally, she is generally interested in applied probability and convex analysis. Her PhD research focused on algorithmic and theoretical studies of approximate message passing, as well as provably convergent optimization algorithms for nonlinear diffractive imaging. Her postdoctoral work developed principled methods for dead time compensation for single-photon detectors based on Markov chain modeling.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025
      Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
      Location: Hyderabad, India
      MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; François Germain; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.

        Sponsorship

        MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

        MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.

        Technical Program

        MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.

        MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.

        Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".

        About ICASSP

        ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
    •  
    •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2023
      Date: Sunday, June 4, 2023 - Saturday, June 10, 2023
      Location: Rhodes Island, Greece
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Suhas Lohit; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Joshua Rapp; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2023, which is being held in Rhodes Island, Greece from June 4-10, 2023.

        Organization

        Petros Boufounos is serving as General Co-Chair of the conference this year, where he has been involved in all aspects of conference planning and execution.

        Perry Wang is the organizer of a special session on Radar-Assisted Perception (RAP), which will be held on Wednesday, June 7. The session will feature talks on signal processing and deep learning for radar perception, pose estimation, and mutual interference mitigation with speakers from both academia (Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Tech, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and industry (Mitsubishi Electric, Bosch, Waveye).

        Anthony Vetro is the co-organizer of the Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS), which will be held on Monday, June 5, and feature invited talks from leaders in both academia and industry on timely topics related to autonomous systems.

        Sponsorship

        MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, June 8. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

        MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Rabab Ward, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Alexander Waibel, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

        Technical Program

        MERL is presenting 13 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation and speech enhancement, radar imaging, depth estimation, motor fault detection, time series recovery, and point clouds. One workshop paper has also been accepted for presentation on self-supervised music source separation.

        Perry Wang has been invited to give a keynote talk on Wi-Fi sensing and related standards activities at the Workshop on Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), which will be held on Sunday, June 4.

        Additionally, Anthony Vetro will present a Perspective Talk on Physics-Grounded Machine Learning, which is scheduled for Thursday, June 8.

        About ICASSP

        ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event attracts more than 2000 participants each year.
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  • MERL Publications

    •  Kitichotkul, R., Rapp, J., Ma, Y., Mansour, H., "Simultaneous Range and Velocity Measurement with Doppler Single-Photon Lidar", Optica, DOI: 10.1364/​OPTICA.555984, Vol. 12, pp. 604-613, April 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-050 PDF
      • @article{Kitichotkul2025apr,
      • author = {Kitichotkul, Ruangrawee and Rapp, Joshua and Ma, Yanting and Mansour, Hassan},
      • title = {{Simultaneous Range and Velocity Measurement with Doppler Single-Photon Lidar}},
      • journal = {Optica},
      • year = 2025,
      • volume = 12,
      • pages = {604--613},
      • month = apr,
      • doi = {10.1364/OPTICA.555984},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-050}
      • }
    •  Lin, C., Boufounos, P.T., Ma, Y., Wang, Y., Ding, Q., Sels, D., Chien, C.-C., "Time-optimal single-scalar control on a qubit of unitary dynamics", Physical Review, April 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-048 PDF
      • @article{Lin2025apr2,
      • author = {Lin, Chungwei and Boufounos, Petros T. and Ma, Yanting and Wang, Yebin and Ding, Qi and Sels, Dries and Chien, Chih-Chun},
      • title = {{Time-optimal single-scalar control on a qubit of unitary dynamics}},
      • journal = {Physical Review},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = apr,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-048}
      • }
    •  Kitichotkul, R., Rapp, J., Ma, Y., Mansour, H., "Doppler Single-Photon Lidar", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/​ICASSP49660.2025.10888897, April 2025, pp. 1-5.
      BibTeX TR2025-028 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Kitichotkul2025mar,
      • author = {Kitichotkul, Ruangrawee and Rapp, Joshua and Ma, Yanting and Mansour, Hassan},
      • title = {{Doppler Single-Photon Lidar}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
      • year = 2025,
      • pages = {1--5},
      • month = mar,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10888897},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-028}
      • }
    •  Lin, C., Boufounos, P.T., Ma, Y., Wang, Y., "Time-optimal single-scalar control on a qubit of unitary dynamics", arXiv, April 2025.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Lin2025apr,
      • author = {Lin, Chungwei and Boufounos, Petros T. and Ma, Yanting and Wang, Yebin},
      • title = {{Time-optimal single-scalar control on a qubit of unitary dynamics}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = apr,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01785}
      • }
    •  Shastri, S., Ma, Y., Boufounos, P.T., Mansour, H., "Deep Calibration and Operator Learning for Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging", European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), DOI: 10.23919/​EUSIPCO63174.2024.10715281, August 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-128 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shastri2024aug,
      • author = {Shastri, Saurav and Ma, Yanting and Boufounos, Petros T. and Mansour, Hassan},
      • title = {{Deep Calibration and Operator Learning for Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging}},
      • booktitle = {European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = aug,
      • doi = {10.23919/EUSIPCO63174.2024.10715281},
      • issn = {2076-1465},
      • isbn = {978-9-4645-9361-7},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-128}
      • }
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  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Method for Tomographic Imaging of Object Reflectivity under Inhomogeneous Background Media"
      Inventors: Mansour, Hassan; Ma, Yanting; Boufounos, Petros T.
      Patent No.: 11,948,229
      Issue Date: Apr 2, 2024
    • Title: "SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR IMAGE PROCESSING BASED ON OPTIMAL TRANSPORT AND EPIPOLAR GEOMETRY"
      Inventors: Ma, Yanting; Liu, Dehong; Boufounos, Petros T.; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 11,842,504
      Issue Date: Dec 12, 2023
    • Title: "Sensing using Inverse Multiple Scattering with Phaseless Measurements"
      Inventors: Ma, Yanting; Lodhi, Muhammad Asad; Mansour, Hassan; Boufounos, Petros T.; Liu, Dehong
      Patent No.: 11,635,394
      Issue Date: Apr 25, 2023
    • Title: "System and Method for Tracking a Deformation"
      Inventors: Aeron, Shuchin; Ma, Yanting; Boufounos, Petros T.; Mansour, Hassan
      Patent No.: 11,500,086
      Issue Date: Nov 15, 2022
    • Title: "Systems and Methods for Blind Multi-Spectral Image Fusion"
      Inventors: Liu, Dehong; Yu, Lantao; Ma, Yanting; Mansour, Hassan; Boufounos, Petros T.
      Patent No.: 11,481,876
      Issue Date: Oct 25, 2022
    • Title: "Systems and Methods of Fusing Multi-angle View HD Images Based on Epipolar Geometry and Matrix Completion"
      Inventors: Liu, Dehong; Ma, Yanting; Mansour, Hassan; Kamilov, Ulugbek; Taguchi, Yuichi; Boufounos, Petros T.; Vetro, Anthony
      Patent No.: 10,212,410
      Issue Date: Feb 19, 2019
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