[1][2] Her more recent research has focused on assistive technology including the automated recognition of sign language.
[3] She is CUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York.
[4][5] A 2000 paper by Tian on facial expression analysis, with Takeo Kanade and Jeffrey F. Cohn, received the 2019 Test of Time Award at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
[6] Tian was named to the 2018 class of IEEE Fellows, "for her work in automatic facial expression analysis and human activity understanding and monitoring".
[1] In 2020, Tian was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, "for contributions to automatic facial expression analysis and human activity understanding".