Marcus Ma

Hello! I am a PhD Student at USC and Chief Technology Officer/Co-Founder at Echo Group. I am advised by Shrikanth Narayanan in the SAIL Lab and supported by the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Graduate Student Fellowship. I previously received my Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Georgia Tech with concentrations in Intelligence and Theory, where I was fortunate to be advised by Wei Xu (Master’s), Jennifer Gahee Kim (Undergrad), and Lelia Glass (Undergrad).

I am broadly interested in making artificial systems that are capable of modeling language capable of modeling thought. I personally reject the theory of embodied cognition and believe that given the proper environment, completely digital systems are capable of intelligence; I believe that while this future is still very far off, agentic language models are our best attempts yet. The missing piece is grounding: only through grounding can language models develop intuitions for causality and interaction.

At Echo Group, we support linguistic grounding by generating insights derived directly from human preference. Echo provides unique population-level insights on true human opinions by collecting feedback directly from human sources rather than LLM-based fascimiles. Learn more on our company website.

Feel free to take a look at my research publications or my various lab involvements. I have also written descriptions of my various industry work along with my resume.