Professor Yan Ma is a faculty member at the College of Information, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Normal University. She received her Ph.D. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from the Institute of Pattern Recognition and Image Processing at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1999. Her research interests include semi-supervised image segmentation, clustering analysis, and biological phenotype analysis. She has led several national and provincial-level research projects, including those funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Professor Ma has authored more than 30 SCI-indexed papers in high-impact journals such as Information Sciences, Expert Systems with Applications, and Knowledge-Based Systems. Her work on deep learning-based automatic evaluation of rice seed germination was recognized as a “Top Downloaded Article” by Wiley.