She received her doctorate in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1968. She join the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica in 2004. She was a software architect in the OS Base Core Technology group of Microsoft Corporation from 2000 to 2004. Before joining Microsoft, she was a professor of Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1973 to 2000.
Dr. Jane Liu's research interests have been in the areas of real-time and embedded systems, distributed systems, communication networks and personal and home automation and assistive devices. Prior to 2004, her research focused primarily on theories, algorithms, architectures and tools for building real-time and embedded systems from components, and validating their timing performance efficiently and reliably. In addition to journal and conference publications, she has also published two books, one on real-time systems and the other on signals and systems. She has led several development efforts, including the PERTS system of building blocks and tools and a kernel-level processor-reservation mechanism. The former supports the design, evaluation and validation of real-time systems. The latter protects time-critical applications and system components from adverse effects of processor contention and enables the timing behavior of independently developed components on an open platform to be tuned and assessed.
Her recent research focuses on technologies for building personal and home automation and assistive devices and services. Some of them are primarily devices of convenience designed to enhance the quality of life and self-reliance of their users, including elderly individuals as well as people who are chronically ill or functionally limited. Other devices can also serve as point-of-care and automation tools for use at home and in care-providing institutions. Examples include smart medication dispensers and administration tools, autonomous home appliances and robotic helpers. Such a device must be affordable and easy to use. It should be easily configured to work with a variety of sensors and to rely on different support infrastructures. It should also be customizable according to its user’s preferences and capable of adapting to changes in the user’s needs, mindset and skills. A major thrust of her research has been directed towards developing system architectures, components, platforms and tools for building such devices and services at low-cost, including the development of an embedded workflow framework and a simulation environment. Recent results of this work and links to open source software projects can be found at the SISARL homepage http://sisarl.org .
Dr. Jane Liu was the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers from 1996-1999. She serves on program committees of numerous international conferences. She won the Technical Achievement Award of IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in 2005 and was awarded the Information Science Honorary Medal from Taiwan Institute of Information and Computing Machinery in 2008. She is a member of ACM and a Fellow of IEEE