His research spans artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational advertising, data mining, and information retrieval.
He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012[1] for his contributions to pattern recognition, search, content analysis, and computational advertising.
He was a research staff member there till 2000 when he joined Verity Inc., a leader in Enterprise Search (acquired by Autonomy and then by Hewlett-Packard).
His organization was responsible for building advertising platforms, technologies, and products, and running a multi-billion-dollar advertising marketplace that serves both search ads and native ads on search and content publishers including Bing, Verizon Media, Microsoft News, and Outlook in the US and international markets.
Mao was the commencement speaker for the class of 2018 Spring in the College of Engineering at Michigan State University.