Congbo Ma | Academic Homepage

About

I am currently a post-doctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, working with Dr. Farah Emad Shamout. Before that, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University, where I worked with Prof. Jia Wu and Prof. Jian Yang. During this period, I was also a visiting researcher at MBZUAI, working with Prof. Preslav Nakov.

I received my PhD from the University of Adelaide, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Wei (Emma) Zhang, Dr. Mingyu Guo, and Dr. Weitong Chen. Prior to my doctoral studies, I gained research experience as a research assistant under the supervision of Prof. Steven Hoi at Singapore Management University.

My research interests include natural language processing, data mining, medical machine learning, and multimodal learning.

News

Feb 2026
One paper on multi-modal social event detection has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Big Data.

Jan 2026
One paper on Arabic medical NLP has been accepted to an EACL 2026 workshop (HeaLing).
Jan 2026
Secured research funding from the NYUAD Access and Innovation Award (AY 2025–2026) as Principal Investigator.
Jan 2026
Two papers on social event detection have been accepted by WWW 2026.
Aug 2025
One multi-document summarization paper has been accepted by ADMA 2025.
May 2025
Three papers have been accepted by ACL 2025.

Publications

Grouped by year. Click a year to expand/collapse.

20263

Cross-lingual Empirical Evaluation of Large Language Models for Arabic Medical Tasks.

C Abouzahir, C Ma, FE Shamout, N Habash

Accepted by EACL 2026 Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health

To appear

Give a Hint: LLM-Enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection.

Z Qiu, C Ma, J Wu, J Yang

Accepted by WWW 2026

To appear

PiGCN: Physics-Inspired Graph Convolution Networks for Heterogeneous Social Event Detection.

Y Yu, C Ma, J Wu, J Yang, Z Qiu

Accepted by WWW 2026

To appear

20257

Rethinking Transformer-based Multi-document Summarization: An Empirical Investigation.

C Ma, WE Zhang, D Pitawela, H Zhuang, Y Shu, Q Li, H Wang

The 21st International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2025, oral), Kyoto, Japan, 2025

HD-NDEs: Neural Differential Equations for Hallucination Detection in LLMs.

Q Li, J Geng, Z Chen, D Zhu, Y Wang, C Ma, C Lyu, F Karray

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Main 2025, Long Papers), Vienna, Austria, 2025

Explicit and Implicit Data Augmentation for Social Event Detection.

C Ma, Y Wang, J Wu, J Yang, J Du, Z Qiu, Q Li, H Wang, P Nakov

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Main 2025, Long Papers), Vienna, Austria, 2025

Text is All You Need: LLM-enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection.

Z Qiu, C Ma, J Wu, J Yang

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Main 2025, Long Papers), Vienna, Austria, 2025

Enhanced Social Event Detection through Dynamically Weighted Meta-Paths Modeling.

C Ma, Z Qiu, H Wang, J Du, S Xue, J Wu, J Yang

Proceedings of The Web Conference 2025 (WWW’25), Sydney, Australia, 2025

Uncertainty Quantification for Machine Learning in Healthcare: A Survey.

L J L Lopez, S Elsharief, D A Jorf, F Darwish, C Ma, F E Shamout

Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL 2025), Berkeley, CA, 2025

In-Model Merging for Enhancing the Robustness of Medical Imaging Classification Models.

H Wang, I Almakky, C Ma, N Saeed, M Yaqub

Proceedings of the 36th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC’25), Sheffield, UK, 2025

20244

Disentangling Specificity for Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization.

C Ma, WE Zhang, H Wang, H ZHuang, M Guo

Accepted by WCCI-IJCNN 2024

An Efficient Automatic Meta-Path Selection for Social Event Detection via Hyperbolic Space.

Z Qiu, C Ma, J Wu, J Yang

Accepted by WWW 2024

Human–AI Collaborative Multi-modal Multi-rater Learning for Endometriosis Diagnosis.

H Wang, D Butler, Y Zhang, J Avery, S Knox, C Ma, L Hull, G Carneiro

Physics in Medicine & Biology, vol. 70, Dec. 2024, p. 015008

Enhancing Chemistry-Domain Scientific Paper Summarization by Knowledge Graphs.

Y Qu, J Yang, W Chen, Y Jiao, L Yang, C Ma

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA’24), Sydney, Australia, 2024

20233

Learnable cross-modal knowledge distillation for multi-modal learning with missing modality.

H Wang, C Ma, J Zhang, Y Zhang, J Avery, L Hull, G Carneiro

International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2023)

Data Hiding with Deep Learning: A Survey Unifying Digital Watermarking and Steganography.

Z Wang, O Byrnes, H Wang, R Sun, C Ma, H Chen, Q Wu, M Xue

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 10, May 2023, pp. 2985–2999

Multi-modal Learning with Missing Modality via Shared-Specific Feature Modeling.

H Wang, Y Chen, C Ma, J Avery, L Hull, G Carneiro

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023 (CVPR 2023)

20226

An Empirical Study on Topic Preservation in Multi-Document Summarization.

M Sim, WE Zhang, C Ma

Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP SRW 2022)

Learning From the Source Document: Unsupervised Abstractive Summarization.

H Zhuang, WE Zhang, J Yang, C Ma, Y Qu and QZ Sheng.

2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022 Findings)

Incorporating Linguistic Knowledge for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization.

C Ma, WE Zhang, H Wang, S Gupta ,M Guo

Pacific Asia Conference on Language Information and Computation 2022 (PACLIC 2022)

Combining Document-aware Encoding and Linguistic-guided Encoding for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization.

C Ma, WE Zhang, PD Pitawela, Y Qu, H Zhuang, H Wang

IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence 2022 (WCCI 2022)

Multi-document Summarization via Deep Learning Techniques: A Survey.

C Ma, WE Zhang, M Guo, H Wang, QZ Sheng

ACM Computing Survey (2022)

Uncertainty-aware Multi-modal Learning via Cross-modal Random Network Prediction.

H Wang, J Zhang, Y Chen, C Ma, J Avery, L Hull, G Carneiro

European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (ECCV 2022)

20212

Improving Deep Learning based Multi-document Summarization through Linguistic Knowledge.

C Ma

International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Doctoral Consortium Paper (SIGIR’21)

Multi-intersection Traffic Optimisation: A Benchmark Dataset and a Strong Baseline.

H Wang, H Chen, Q Wu, C Ma, Y Li, C Shen

IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation System (2021)

20202

The 10 research topics in the Internet of Things.

WE Zhang, QZ Sheng, A Mahmood, M Zaib, SAHamad, A Aljubairy, AAF Alhazmi, S Sagar, C Ma

IEEE 6th International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing 2020 (CIC 2020)

Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Random Distances.

H Wang, G Pang, C Shen, C Ma

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2020 (IJCAI 2020)

20191

Multi-label thoracic disease image classification with cross-attention networks.

C Ma, H Wang, SCH Hoi

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions 2019 (MICCAI 2019)

20181

Randomized online CP decomposition.

C Ma, X Yang, H Wang

International Conference on Advanced Computational Intelligence 2018 (ICACI 2018)

20171

A Fast Image Matting Method based on Interval-line Sampling.

H Wang, Z Yang, C Ma

IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering 2017 (ICSE 2017)

Awards

2025
New York University Abu Dhabi Research Travel Grant
2025
Outstanding Volunteer in 2025 Chinese Bridge Language Proficiency Competition – UAE Regional Finals
2024
ADMA 2024 Outstanding Service
2023
Adelaide Graduate Research School Travel Grant
2022
WCCI 2022 Travel Grant
2020
School of Computer Science PhD Scholarship with Corresponding Full Fee Scholarship

Academic and Professional Service

Tutorial Co-organizer, IEEE BioCAS 2025
Communication Chair, Women in Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, 2025–2026
Workshop Co-organizer, BioFM Workshop at ICDM 2025
Area Chair, IJCNN 2025
Proceedings Chair, ADMA 2024

Activities / Experience

Advanced Natural Language Processing (2024), Macquarie University, Guest Lecturer, Tutor
Artificial Intelligence (2023), The University of Adelaide, Guest Lecturer, Tutor
Concepts in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (2022), The University of Adelaide, Tutor
Artificial Intelligence (2022), The University of Adelaide, Tutor
Distributed Databases and Data Mining (2021), The University of Adelaide, Tutor
Applied Natural Language Processing (2020), The University of Adelaide, Tutor
Discrete mathematics Class (2016), South China University of Technology, Tutor