Dr Liu has worked in both academic and industry. He has taught in three Universities in Canada, the University of Melbourne, and City University of Hong Kong, SAR, China. Since joining the School of Creative Media, he has initiated a number of research and development projects on media/graphics systems that offer media students, content creators, and users new, intelligent active platforms. He has successfully supervised numerous, mostly PhD, postgraduate students in computer science, media technologies, and more recently, media art.

Dr Liu has served numerous international conferences as chairman or member of program committees. He is an Associate Editor and Guest Editor for more a dozen major international journals. Professor Liu was the Vice-Chairman and Chairman of IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, Hong Kong Chapter, co-founder and Chairman of IEEE SMC International Technical Committee on Media Computing (TCMC), and a member of IEEE International Technical Committee on Fuzzy Systems (TCFS). Dr Liu was invited as distinguished Professor by universities in China, Canada and Italy and presented many keynote speeches at international conferences. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in IEEE SCMS.

Professor Liu was the Director and Principal Investigator of Computer Vision and Machine Intelligence Lab (CVMIL)and then of the Intelligent Systems Lab (ISL) at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

As part of the China's Space Program initiatives in the late of 70s, in 1978 after going through a series of excruciatingly rigorous National Examinations and Screenings, Dr Liu was selected by the Chinese Government to join the first handful of Chinese postgraduate students to study Aerospace Science and Engineering in North America and Western Europe. He was fortunate to have studied at the world leading school, the Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), The University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Dr Liu was a Senior/Principal systems engineer in electronics and communications industry in China and Canada. Ever since the mid 1970s he participated or led the following major research and development projects: China's first generation of inertial guidance systems for navigation of missiles and aircraft; Channel equalization schemes in wireless and mobile communications; Code Division Multiplex Access (CDMA) coding scheme initiatives (written in C programming language), which was supported in part by the Canadian Government; Wireless data communications, in particular, for mobile office scenarios; and Internet/Intranet wireless data communications in enterprises.