Li Ma received the PhD degree in computer science from the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2003. He worked for IBM China Research Lab as a research member since 2003. His current research interests include knowledge management, semantic web, data management, image processing, pattern recognition, and biometrics.

He is the manager of the Semantic Technologies team at IBM China Research Lab. The team is to develop core Semantic Web technologies and to apply them for enterprise information management (e.g., master data management). He is responsbile for the design and development of IBM Semantic Object Repository (SOR) which is a high-performance store for semantic web data and has been widely used by worldwide research prototypes, as well as integrated by several IBM solutions and products. In the past several years, he has published many papers at top international journals and conferences in pattern recognition and semantic web.