Ben Ma
Cross-cultural music researcher, software engineer, A.I. practitioner, DJ, harmonica blower.
What can music do to bring the world together?
With skills in software engineering, machine learning, academic research, leadership, and music production, my goal is to promote international relationships through cross-cultural music sharing.
I conducted music emotion recognition research using machine learning techniques at USC CCMI, then joined Schwarzman Scholars in 2021-22 to study U.S.-China popular music exchange at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 2022, I joined Amazon Alexa as a software development engineer, working on NLU conversation flow intelligence. In 2023, I left Amazon to join music tech startup Rivet as their first full-stack software engineer, developing a fan engagement platform to guide and empower independent music artists in building their fan communities.
Based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
selected publications
- ACIIPredicting human-reported enjoyment responses in happy and sad musicIn 2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2019
- PLoS ONEA computational lens into how music characterizes genre in filmPloS one, 2021