Dongning Ma

Architecting efficient and reliable AI systems

Postdoctoral Associate, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

I am a postdoctoral research associate at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, working with Prof. Abdulrahman Mahmoud. I obtained my Ph.D. degree from Villanova University in 2025 under the supervision of Prof. Xun Jiao, and my B.Eng. degree from University of Science and Technology Beijing in 2018 under the supervision of Dr. Jiyuan Dong.

I have published more than 30 papers in venues including ASPLOS, DAC, SIGIR, and TCAD, with best paper awards and nominations from DATE, ISSRE, Euromicro DSD, and SELSE.

My research focuses on:

News

Oct 2026 Our submission to the CHIA hackathon at the First International Workshop on Agentic Approaches to Computer Architecture @ MICRO'26 on agentic BCI hardware optimization ranks top 12 and is accepted as a spotlight paper! Paper
Oct 2026 Our submission to the CHIA hackathon at the First International Workshop on Agentic Approaches to Computer Architecture @ MICRO'26 on agentic cross-architecture model adaptation is accepted as a short paper! Paper
Mar 2026 Our paper about "Hyperdimensional Computing Evaluation Framework" accepted to IJCNN'26! Paper
Mar 2026 Our paper about "Soft Error Injection to NLP Models" accepted (with shepherding) to ACNS'26! Paper
Jan 2026 Our paper about "Error Modeling of Approximate Computing Circuits" accepted to ISCAS'26! Paper
Nov 2025 Our paper about "Stealing Hyperdimensional Computing Models" accepted to WSDM'26! Paper

Earlier news (6)

Oct 2025 Our ISSRE'25 paper wins the Best Research Paper Award! Paper
Sep 2025 Our poster and demo presentation about "Spike Sorting Interface" accepted to NER'25! Paper
Aug 2025 Our paper about "Hyperdimensional Computing Based Blockchain" accepted to BioCAS'25! Paper
Aug 2025 Our paper about "Silent Data Corruptions in Deep Recommender Systems" accepted to ISSRE'25! Paper
Aug 2025 I joined Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence as a postdoctoral research associate, working with Prof. Abdulrahman Mahmoud!
Apr 2025 I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis!

Selected publications

WSDM'26

Stealing Black-box Hyperdimensional Computing Models Without Data

Dongning Ma, Ruixuan Wang, and Xun Jiao

19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Boise, Idaho, USA, 2026
ISSRE'25

Understanding Recommendation System Robustness Against Silent Data Corruption: An Empirical Study

Dongning Ma, Xun Jiao, Fred Lin, Daniel Moore, and Sriram Sankar

36th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, São Paulo, Brazil, 2025

Best Research Paper Award
SIGIR'24

Memory-Efficient Deep Recommender Systems using Approximate Rotary Compositional Embedding

Dongning Ma and Xun Jiao

47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Washington D.C., USA, 2024
ASPLOS'24

Dr. DNA: Combating Silent Data Corruptions in Deep Learning using Distribution of Neuron Activations

Dongning Ma, Fred Lin, Alban Desmaison, Joel Coburn, Daniel Moore, Sriram Sankar, and Xun Jiao

ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, San Diego, California, USA, 2024
TCAD'23

Testing and Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of Hyperdimensional Computing

Dongning Ma, Tajana Šimunić Rosing, and Xun Jiao

IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2023
DAC'21

HDTest: Differential Fuzz Testing of Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing

Dongning Ma, Jianmin Guo, Yu Jiang, and Xun Jiao

58th ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference, San Francisco, California, USA, 2021

All 37 publications