His research expertise spans areas including cloud and edge computing, workflows, distributed systems, software development environments and service oriented computing.

Recent research projects have examined areas such as service oriented computing in the cloud, scheduling and temporal analysis in cloud workflows, and big data management in cloud computing. All of these projects have been partially funded by the ARC.

Alongside his teaching and research responsibilities, Professor Yang is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Sytems and was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.