He received his PhD in the theory of computation from Harvard University in 2012. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University in 2012 and 2014, and an alpha modeler at Two Sigma Investments from 2014 through 2016. Dr Liu received the Best Student Paper Award at ECML/PKDD 2010 and the Best Paper Award Runner-up at IEEE INFOCOM 2015. Currently, Dr Liu is using tools from applied probability, theoretical computer science, and optimisation to build scalable systems for analysing massive networked datasets