Dr. Chow began his academic career in this department upon completion of his doctoral degree in the United States. His first contribution was on establishing HARNET, the first academic and research network for tertiary institutions in Hong Kong (with Raymond Loand Dr. Ng). His earlier research works were in expert systems development and Chinese computing. In those years, Dr. Chow has used expert systems techniques successfully in implementing a staff roster or rostering system for a local airline (with Dr. Lucas Hui), a refuse collection vehicle scheduling system for Regional Services Department (with D. Hung and C.T. Hung), and an air conditioning plant diagnostic system. In the years 1994-1997, Dr. Chow, together with Dr. D. Cheung, Prof. Chin, Dr. T.W. Lam, Dr. W.W. Tsang and a team of software engineers developed the search engine for Hong Kong Telecom's 108 Telephone Directory Enquiry System using state of the art technology in main memory database and distributed computing. Since 1997, Dr. Chow is the Associate Director of Center for Information Security and Cryptography (CISC), Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong. From 1997 to 2002, Dr. Chow has managed several cryptographic system research and development projects, which include the Strong Cryptographic Library (SCL), Strong Cryptographic Infrastructure for Electronic Commerce, and Secure Preservation of Electronic Documents.

In the recent years, Dr. Chow's research interests have migrated to computer forensics and digital investigations, and is the leader of the Computer Forensics Research Group of CISC. He was the chief designer of the bilingual digital forensics tool, Digital Evidence Search Kit (DESK), and the Internet piracy monitoring system Lineament. Dr. Chow has been a member of the Programme Committee of the international forensics workshop SADFE and was the conference chairman of the Sixth IFIP WG 11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics held in January 2010 in Hong Kong. In addition to forensic tool development, Dr. Chow is also interested in digital forensics and investigation research, which include live system analysis, digital evidence analysis using Bayesian model, digital crime scene reconstruction, software vulnerability analysis and has performed studies in buffer overflow techniques and prevention.

Dr. Chow is also the Associate Programme Director for the MSc in E-Commerce and Internet Computing Programme. He is one of the instructor for the course e-Crime and gives lectures on digital evidence handling. Dr. Chow is the chairman of the Information Security and Forensics Society (Hong Kong) and a council member of the Hong Kong Forensic Science Society.

Dr. Chow has provided consultancy and training to local organizations including Hong Kong Telecom, Hong Kong Airport Services Limited, Hewlett Packard and MPFA in the areas distributed computing, Internet technology and software quality assurance. In the past few years, Dr. Chow has been invited to be a computer forensics expert to assist the Court and give advice to counsels on understanding and interpreting digital evidence in Hong Kong.