Xiaogang Ma

Ma has 25% native heritage of the tribe Tujia in China. Raised up in Tianmen, Hubei province, he finished elementary to high school education in the same county, and then went to Wuhan in 1998 for college. Ma earned his B.Eng and Dr.Eng both from China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), and PhD from University of Twente. His interests in geoinformatics was initiated by a few research projects he participated when he was an undergraduate student of Land Resource Management. Before graduation he was awarded a scholarship for graduate study at the same university, where he finished a doctorate degree in Geoinformatics Engineering. As the degree was engineering-oriented, Ma went forward for a science-oriented graduate study at ITC, originally affiliating with Utrecht University and then University of Twente. He had close collaboration with the international open data projects OneGeology and OneGeology-Europe during that time. In 2011, he was awarded a PhD degree of Earth System Science and GIScience with his dissertation "Ontology Spectrum for Geological Data Interoperability".[2] In early 2012, Ma joined the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as a postdoctorate fellow, with financial supports from the Sloan Foundation and NSF.[3] At RPI, he received intensive training of data science methods and semantic technologies, and he participated and led several research projects.[4] In 2014, Ma was promoted to associate research scientist at RPI.[5]

Ma's research addresses the needs of methods and building blocks in the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem to facilitate data science. At RPI, he took leadership roles for ontology development in the Global Change Information System[6][7] of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and data science activities of the Sloan-funded Deep Carbon Observatory.[8] He also taught a data analytics course for the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at RPI.[9]

In 2016, Ma joined the Department of Computer Science at University of Idaho (UI). He continued his research on data science and geoinformatics at UI, including knowledge graphs, open data, and algorithms for spatio-temporal analysis, and he created several new courses related to data science and open data. In 2016 and 2017 Ma was an affiliate scientist with MILES - Managing Idaho's Landscapes for Ecosystem Services project,[10] where he contributed to the cyberinfrastructure development. In 2018, he co-initiated the U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium (US2TS) and received sponsorship from NSF, the Sloan Foundation, and Elsevier's Artificial Intelligence journal.[11] Since 2017, Ma has worked intensively on the deep-time data science, with several projects funded by NSF and NASA. He has also been active in community programs or initiatives, including the Deep-Time Data Infrastructure,[12] the Deep-time Data Driven Discoveries,[13] and the IUGS Deep-time Digital Earth.[14] In 2020 and 2021, Ma led a team of researchers from four U.S. universities and received a multi-million grant from NSF to conduct cross-disciplinary data science studies on climate change, ecology, biology, socioeconomics, and public health.[15]

Ma is associate editor or editorial board member for several journals, including Computers & Geosciences, Applied Computing & Geosciences, Data Science Journal, Earth Science Informatics, and Big Earth Data. He has been the Chair of the Awards Committee of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) since 2019.[16] Previously, he served as Councilor of IAMG, Chair of the Geoinformatics and Data Science Division of the Geological Society of America, Chair of the Task Group for Coordinating Data Standards amongst Scientific Unions under CODATA,[17] and Member of the Independent Review Board for NASA's Planetary Data Ecosystem.[18] Ma is also active in several other data science and geoinformatics communities, including the American Geophysical Union, the Research Data Alliance, and the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners.

• 2022: "Knowledge graph construction and application in geosciences: A review", Computers & Geosciences, 161, 105082
• 2022: "Encyclopedia of Mathematical Geosciences" (section editor - geoinformatics), Springer, Cham
• 2018: "Data Science for Geoscience: Leveraging Mathematical Geosciences with Semantics and Open Data", Handbook of Mathematical Geosciences: Fifty Years of IAMG, Springer, Berlin
• 2018: "Information extraction and knowledge graph construction from geoscience literature", Computers & Geosciences, 112, 112-120
• 2015: "Semantic eScience" (lead editor), Springer, Berlin. Special Issue of Earth Science Informatics, ISSN 1865-0473
• 2014: "Capturing provenance of global change information", Nature Climate Change, 4(6), 409-413

• 2021 Outstanding Early-Career Faculty, University of Idaho College of Engineering[19]
• 2018 SciTS Meritorious Contribution Award, Science of Team Science Conference[20]
• 2015 Andrei B. Vistelius Research Award, International Association for Mathematical Geosciences[21]
• 2014 Data Stewardship Award, International Council for Science World Data System[22]
• 2012 Funding Friday Research Grant, Federation of Earth Science Information Partners[23]