He received his Ph.D. on Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Control from Tsinghua University in 1996. He joined IBMChina Research Lab as a Staff Research Member in 1996. He then joined Polytechnical University as a postdoctoral scientist (May 1997-March 1998) before joinng the IBM Thomas .J. Watson Research Center in March 1998. He chaired the Services Computing Professional Interest Community at IBM Research from 2004 to 2006. He also chaired the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Services Computing from 2005 to 2008. He was the lead IBM researcher on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, web services, and interactive media systems. More specifically, he was the designer of HyperChain Framework and a lead architect for the IBM HotVideo Hyper Video technology (which won the CNET/PC Expo's "Best of Show Software Award" in 2000.)

He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Web Services Research since 2003 and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

He was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE in 2011, and in the same year won the IEEE Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering contributions to Application Design Techniques in Services Computing"