He is the founding director of the Spatial Information and Intelligence Laboratory, which is housed in the College of IST. He is also a member of GeoVISTA center and Center for Human-Computer Interaction. Dr. Cai conducts research in the areas of information retrieval, geographical information science, human-computer interaction and communication, and visual mediation of collaborative work. He has published papers in the international journals such as Proceedings of IEEE, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Transactions in GIS, Geoinformatics, Environment and Planning B, and international journal of NETWORKS. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and ASPRS.