Ma Weiying, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, has left Microsoft and joined Toutiao.com as vice president.

In his new role, Ma will lead Toutiao's artificial intelligence laboratory. The news has been confirmed by Toutiao.

Ma joined MSRA in April 2001 as director of the researcher in the network search and mining team, leading the studies of information retrieval, Internet search technology, data mining, multimedia management, and mobile information browsing. `Ma worked for HP lab between 1997 and 2001.

Ma gained his Master's degree and PhD of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994 and 1997, respectively. During his PhD study period, Ma participated in the Alexandria Digital Library project of UCSB.

Since 2016, Toutiao has introduced several new vice presidents. Former Uber China strategy head Liu Zhen was previously appointed senior vice president of Toutiao; and former Iqiyi senior vice president Zhen Wei was appointed vice president and video cooperation general manager of Toutiao.