Qiang was the head of computer science and engineering department and university named chair professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He was a founding head of Huawei Noah's Ark Lab specializing in big data, data mining and artificial intelligence and is the program chair of 2015 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2015).

He was the general chair for the 2012 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2012), program chair for KDD 2010, and general chair for ACM Recommender Systems Conference in 2013 (ACM RecSys 2013). He is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Big Data (IEEE TBD), was founding editor-in-chief of ACM TIST journal ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.

He is a fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), American Association of Advancement of Science (AAAS), International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).