Jiannong Cao is also the Dean of Graduate School, the director of Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Things (RIAIoT) in PolyU, the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab (IMCL). Cao was the founding director and now the director of PolyU's University's Research Facility in Big Data Analytics (UBDA). He served the department head from 2011 to 2017. He is a member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Science, a fellow of IEEE, a fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF) and an ACM distinguished member. His research interests include distributed systems and blockchain, wireless sensing and networking, big data and machine learning, and mobile cloud and edge computing. He published 5 co-authored and 9 co-edited books, and over 800 papers in major international journals and conference proceedings. He also obtained 34 patents.