Tsai coauthored Knowledge-Based Software Development for Real-Time Distributed Systems (World Scientific, 1993), Distributed Real-Time Systems (Wiley, 1996), Compositional Verification of Concurrent and Real-Time Systems (Springer/Kluwer, 2002), Security Modeling and Analysis of Mobile Agent Systems (Imperial College Press, 2006), and coedited Monitoring and Debugging of Distributed Real-Time Systems (IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995), Machine Learning Applications in Software Engineering (WSP, 2005), Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (Springer, 2006), Machine Learning in Cyber Trust: Security, Privavcy, Reliability (Springer, 2009).

From 2000 to 2003, he chaired the IEEE/CS Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing and served on the steering committee of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. From 1994 to 1999, he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and he is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. Tsai served as the Conference Co-Chair of the 16th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, the 9th IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, the 1st IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing, and the 3rd IFIP International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing. He is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools and Book Series on Health Informatics. Tsai has served on the IEEE Distinguished Speaker program, DARPA ISAT working group, and on the review panel for NSF and NIH. He received an Engineering Foundation Research Award from the IEEE and the Engineering Foundation Society, a University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois Foundation and an IEEE Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the IEEE , and the SDPS.