I am Shang Ma, a third-year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. I am fortunate to be advised by Yanfang (Fanny) Ye and Xusheng Xiao.

I completed my undergraduate degree at Wuyuzhang Honors College of Sichuan University. My undergraduate advisors were Beibei Li and Cheng Huang.

My research interests span mobile security, scam, fraud with a focus on combining program analysis and artificial intelligence techniques to address security challenges.

In my free time, I enjoy road trips, going to the gym, and exploring history and military geography.

🔥 News

2024.10: 🎉🎉 Started my visit at Curiosity Lab, National University of Singapore, working with Zhenkai Liang.
2024.09: 🎉🎉 Our paper “Careful About What App Promotion Ads Recommend! Detecting and Explaining Malware Promotion via App Promotion Graph” was accepted by NDSS 2025.
2024.03: 🎉🎉 Began my visiting at ASE Lab, Peking University, working with Tao Xie.
2022.08: 🎉🎉 Began my PhD journey.

📝 Publications

Shang Ma, Chaoran Chen, Shao Yang, Shifu Hou, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Yanfang Ye. “Careful About What App Promotion Ads Recommend! Detecting and Explaining Malware Promotion via App Promotion Graph.” Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS 2025) [PDF][Code]
Zhongyu Ouyang, Chunhui Zhang, Shifu Hou, Shang Ma, Chaoran Chen, Toby Li, Xusheng Xiao, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye. “Symbolic Prompt Tuning Completes the App Promotion Graph”. European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2024) [PDF]
Zhongyu Ouyang, Shifu Hou, Shang Ma, Chaoran Chen, Chunhui Zhang, Toby Li, Xusheng Xiao, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye. “Prompt Learning Unlocked for App Promotion in the Wild”. NeurIPS 2023 Workshop: New Frontiers in Graph Learning (GLFrontiers 2023) [PDF]

Publications during my undergraduate.

Beibei Li, Shang Ma, Ruilong Deng, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Jin Yang “Federated anomaly detection on system logs for the internet of things: A customizable and communication-efficient approach”. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM)
Beibei Li, Peiran Wang, Hanyuan Huang, Shang Ma, Yukun Jiang. “FlPhish: Reputation-based phishing byzantine defense in ensemble federated learning”. IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2021) Best Paper.

📖 Educations

2022.09 - 2027.05 PhD, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame
2018.09 - 2022.06 Undergraduate, Wuyuzhang Honors College, Sichuan University