Minghua Ma

Minghua Ma

Senior Researcher

Minghua Ma is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft M365 Research. His work focuses on AIOps: building AI systems that autonomously detect, diagnose, and resolve failures in large-scale cloud infrastructure, improving the reliability of services used by millions. He received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2021, advised by Prof. Dan Pei in the Netman Group. His research has been published at top venues including ICSE, FSE, ASE, KDD, VLDB, and MLSys, and deployed in production at Microsoft. He is an IEEE Senior Member and CCF Senior Member.

Internship Opportunities: I am seeking self-motivated undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. intern students. If you are interested in working with me, please email me your CV.

Research Highlights

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Agentic Reliability

Building AI agents that safely close the loop in production operations through reliable intervention, evidence-grounded decisions, failure recovery, and effective human-agent collaboration (ASE'26, FSE'26).

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SysCraft

AI agents that go beyond coding to build and repair real-world software systems. Benchmarked LLM system-building capabilities (TOSEM'26) and developed an evidence-preserving framework for automated package repair (ISSTA'26).

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Triangle

AI-powered incident triage system: from LLM-based interpretable triage (ISSRE'24 & ICSE-SEIP'26) to the multi-agent Triangle system (ASE'25 & FSE'26), alongside a survey of triage in SE practice. Highlighted by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich in the Advancing Reliability blog.

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AIOpsLab

Holistic open-source framework for evaluating AI agents for autonomous cloud operations. From design principles (SoCC'24) to the evaluation framework (MLSys'25), and a tutorial (FSE'25).

News

2026
Award Our paper "Bridging the Mitigation Gap: A Taxonomy-Driven Empirical Study of Incident Recovery in Production LLM Serving" has been selected as an ISSRE 2026 Industry Track Distinguished Paper.
2026
Keynote I will deliver a keynote at the 7th International Workshop on Automated Program Repair, co-located with ASE 2026, in Munich, Germany, in October 2026.
2026
Service I will serve as an Organizer of Build-Bench Challenge | ICSE 2027 in the inaugural ICSE 2027 Competition Track. Welcome to participate!
2026
Recognition I have been elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior Member.
2026
Service I am now a Mentor in the IEEE TCSE Mentoring Program. Mentoring sessions can be booked through the program.
2026
Service I will serve as Tool Demo Track Co-Chair for SANER 2027.
2026
Teaching I will continue as a Mentor for EC-528 Cloud Computing at Boston University in Fall 2026, at the invitation of Prof. Yigong Hu.
2025
Service I will serve as Industry Track Co-Chair for EASE 2026.
2025
Impact Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich highlighted our agent-based triage system, Triangle, in the Advancing Reliability blog.
2024
Release Our team released the AIOpsLab framework to enable the design, development, and evaluation of autonomous AIOps agents.

Experience

Microsoft

2021 – Present
Senior Researcher, M365 Research Redmond, 2024–Present
Senior Researcher, DKI Beijing, 2023–2024
Researcher, MSRA Beijing, 2021–2023

Tsinghua University

2016 – 2021
Ph.D. Student Beijing

Georgia Tech

2019 – 2020
Visiting Scholar Atlanta

Awards

  • 🏆 IEEE ISSRE 2026 Industry Track Distinguished Paper
    "Bridging the Mitigation Gap: A Taxonomy-Driven Empirical Study of Incident Recovery in Production LLM Serving"
  • 🏆 IEEE ISSRE 2025 Best Research Paper Candidate
    "Too Many Cooks: Assessing the Need for Multi-Source Data in Microservice Failure Diagnosis"
  • 🏆 IEEE ISSRE 2024 Best Industry Paper Candidate
    "Early Bird: Ensuring Reliability of Cloud Systems Through Early Failure Prediction"
  • 🏆 IEEE ISSRE 2018 Best Research Paper
    "Robust and Rapid Adaption for Concept Drift in Software System Anomaly Detection"
  • 🎓 Outstanding Graduate
    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, 2021

Teaching

Services

  • Organizer
  • Mentor
  • PC Member
    • 2027: FSE, ICSE-SEIP
    • 2026: FSE Industry, TheWebConf, COLM, ACL, ISSRE, AIOps Workshop
    • 2025: FSE, FSE Industry, ASE, ISSRE, KDD, COLM
    • 2024: FSE Industry, ISSRE, APSEC, KDD, TheWebConf, MILETS
    • 2023: ASE, KDD, MILETS
  • Journal Reviewer
    • ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
    • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
    • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
    • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC)
    • IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC)
    • Journal of Systems & Software (JSS)
    • Neurocomputing
  • Talks
    • Keynote, 7th International Workshop on Automated Program Repair, co-located with ASE 2026, Munich, Germany, October 2026.
    • "Improving Cloud Reliability at Scale using Generative AI" (Invited Talk), University of Michigan, Online, 2025.
    • "AIOpsLab: Enabling Autonomous Cloud Operations with AI Agents" (Tutorial), FSE, Online, 2025.
    • "LLM-based Root Cause Analysis for Cloud Incidents" (Keynote), CCF AIOps Challenge, Beijing, 2023.

Publications

* corresponding author + equal contribution 📝 paper code 🏠 homepage 📎 BibTeX

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