Welcome!

Hello, I’m Junying Ma, an M.Phil. student in Financial Technology at the Society Hub of HKUST(GZ), under the supervision of Prof. Guang ZHANG. I got my B.Sc. degree in Economics from IESR of Jinan University supervised by Prof. Zizhong YAN.

My research interests are to empower social sciences (economics) with machine learning and AI tools, to empirically understand urbans, environments, and human behavior. I aim to build bridges between empirical research and multimodal data.

Currently I am applying for Ph.D. Programs, if you are looking for a Ph.D. student and are interested in me, please feel free to contact me. Any research collaboration in my research fields is also welcome. Thank you!

Research Fields

Intelligent Transportation.
AI for Social Science.

Educations

2023.09 - 2025.07, M.Phil. in Financial Technology, Society Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).
2019.09 - 2023.06, B.Sc. in Economics, Institute for Economic and Social Research, Jinan University.

Honors and Awards

Sep. 2023 Postgraduate Studentship (PGS) award, HKUST(GZ). (CNY 120,000 per year)
Apr. 2023 The 2nd Prize Award of Business Elite, Xiamen International Bank. (CNY 8,000)
Sep. 2022 The 3rd Class Scholarship, Jinan University. (CNY 8,00)
Apr. 2022 The 3rd Prize (National level), National Market Research Competition.
Sep. 2021 The 2nd Prize (Provincial Level), National Mathematical Modelling Competition.
Sep. 2020 Excellent Students Award, Jinan University.
Sep. 2020 The 1st Class Scholarship, Jinan University. (CNY 1,500)

Publication

ARXIV

Adapting to the Unknown: Robust Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Financial Time Series Forecasting

Anxian Liu, Junying Ma, Guang Zhang

Preprint arXiv:2504.09664, 2025.

Working Papers

Accessibility and Productivity: Evidence from Urban Commuting

Jan. 2024 - Present

Collected residential POIs data by quadtree polygon search method, as well as road networks from openstreetmap and GPS trajectory data..
Construct STGNN model, predict the locations of employee residence for firms and build commuting pairs.
Calculate the commuting data for commuting pairs, with the help of Tencent Map on the Linux server.
Explore the impact of commuting on companies’ productivity, with the IV of theoretical shortest time.

Urban Migration, Human Capital and Air pollution: Evidence from the University Admission Examination in China

May. 2022 - Present

Crawled China’s over 3000 universities’s data by Python, and digitalized temperature inversion data by ArcGIS.
Computed the migration index of universities, employed temperature inversion as IV for a 2SLS model and estimated the impact of AQI on universities’ migration effect.
Drew a robust conclusion on the effect of air pollution on the migration of human capital.