Qing Li is a Chair Professor of Data Science and the Head of the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Previously, he was the founding Director of the Multimedia Software Engineering Research Centre (MERC) and a Professor at City University of Hong Kong from 1998 to 2018. He has also taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Australian National University.

Throughout his career, Qing has served as a consultant to prominent organizations, including Microsoft Research Asia and CSIRO in Australia. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IET/IEE, and a member of ACM-SIGMOD and the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering. He currently chairs the Hong Kong Web Society and serves on the executive committees of the IEEE Hong Kong Computer Chapter and the ACM Hong Kong Chapter, as well as being a councillor of the Database Society of the Chinese Computer Federation.