Lei Ma

Lei Ma

About Me

My research lies at the intersection of Data Systems and Artificial Intelligence. I build intelligent data systems that transform raw system telemetry and AI-generated traces into structured knowledge for reliable AI reasoning and lifelong system learning.

I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Elke Rundensteiner, a leading researcher in data management and the founding head of the Data Science Department at WPI.

I am a member of the DAISY (DAta-Driven Intelligent SYstems) Lab, where we study scalable data analytics and AI-driven system intelligence.

My research interests include:

  • Reliable and Explainable AI Systems
  • Multi-Agent Systems and Lifelong Learning
  • Intelligent Data Systems for System Telemetry

News

  • [Review] [2026-03-24] I will serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 26.
  • [Paper] [2026-02-23] Our recent work KRONE is accepted by ICDE 26!
  • [Funding proposal] I served as a primary contributor and lead writer on a co-authored NSF proposal on an AI-driven system reliability analysis framework, which has been submitted.
  • [Review] [2026-01-29] I am serving as a reviewer for ICML 26.
  • [Paper] [2026-01-29] Our recent work EMPalm is accepted by Sensys 26!
  • [Talk] [2025-01-09] I am honored to be invited to give a talk about our work “Cleaning Huge Anomaly-Polluted Log Data Sets Using Sample Selection” at NEDB 25!
  • [Internship] [2024-10-25] I am glad to finish my internship at the Infra Lab ByteBrain of Bytedance! We have been working on a new infra project seemelessly integrated with LLMs!

Publications

  • [VLDB Demo 2026 In Submission] Lei Ma, Suhani Chaudhary, Ethan Shanbaum, Athanasios Tassiadamis, Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Haowen Xu, Elke Rundensteiner. Detect, Localize, and Explain: Interactive Hierarchical Log Anomaly Analytics with LLM Augmentation.
  • [ICML 2026 In Submission] Haowen Xu, Xue Tan, Lei Ma, Zhihao Zhang, Chao Wang, Qingze Wang, Ping Chen, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun.When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems.
  • [ICDE 2026] Lei Ma, Jinyang Liu, Tieying Zhang, Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Lei Cao, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Jianjun Chen. Krone: Hierarchical and Modular Log Anomaly Detection. Paper Code Demo
  • [Sensys 26] Haowen Xu, Tianya Zhao, Xuyu Wang, Lei Ma, Jun Dai, Alexander Wyglinski, Xiaoyan Sun. EMPalm: Exfiltrating Palm Biometric Data via Electromagnetic Side-Channel.
  • [NEDB 2025] Lei Ma, Lei Cao, Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Yao Su, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Cleaning Huge Anomaly-Polluted Log Data Sets Using Sample Selection. Slides Poster
  • [SIGMOD 2025] Dennis M. Hofmann, Peter M. VanNostrand, Lei Ma, Huayi Zhang, Joshua C. DeOliveira, Lei Cao, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Agree to Disagree: Robust Anomaly Detection with Noisy Labels. Paper
  • [SIGMOD 2025] Lei Ma, Lei Cao, Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Yao Su, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Pluto: Sample Selection for Robust Anomaly Detection on Polluted Log Data. Paper
  • [VLDB 2024] Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Lei Ma, Belisha Genin, Randy Huang, Elke A.Rundensteiner. Counterfactual Explanation Analytics: Empowering Lay Users to Take Action Against Consequential Automated Decisions. Paper
  • [FaccT 2024] Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Lei Ma, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Actionable Recourse for Automated Decisions: Examining the Effects of Counterfactual Explanation Type and Presentation on Lay User Understanding. Paper
  • [KDD 2023] Yao Su, Zhentian Qian, Lei Ma, Lifang He, Xiangnan Kong. One-shot Joint Extraction, Registration and Segmentation of Neuroimaging Data. Paper
  • [SIGMOD 2022] Lei Ma, Chuan Lei, Olga Poppe, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Gloria: Graph-based Sharing Optimizer for Event Trend Aggregation. Paper
  • [SIGMOD 2021] Olga Poppe, Chuan Lei, Lei Ma, Elke A. Rundensteiner. To Share, or not to Share Online Event Trend Aggregation OverBursty Event Streams. Paper

Service

  • ICML 2026, Reviewer
  • Infosys, Reviewer

Teaching

Teaching Assistant

  • CS 2303 Systems Programming Concepts, Term C 2019
  • CS 2301 Systems Programming for Non-Majors, Term D 2019
  • CS 3516 Computer Networks, Term A 2019
  • CS 3733 Software Engineering, Term B 2019, Term C 2020

Undergraduate Student Project Mentor

  • REU Project, Summer 2025
  • MQP Project (WPI), Fall 2025 - Spring 2026