Chow's research areas cover interaction design, user experience, persuasive technology, gamification, games, film, and animation. His first book, titled Animation, Embodiment, and Digital Media: Human Experience of Technological Liveliness (Palgrave Macmillan), earned endorsements from Mark Turner (Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University) and Don Norman (Director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego). It was translated into Korean by Donghwan Kim (Chair of English Department, ROK Naval Academy) in 2020 and selected as the Outstanding Book by Korea Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2021. His upcoming book, titled Expressive Iteration: Designing for Meaningful Routines, will be published by Routledge in 2024.

Chow has academic papers published in Digital Creativity, Interaction Studies, International Journal of Design, The Design Journal, International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, among others. Major publications in conference proceedings include Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Creativity and Cognition, and Persuasive Technology. He also has book chapters in Mapping the Posthuman (Routledge), Language and the Creative Mind (The University of Chicago Press) and Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives (University Press of Mississippi and Hong Kong University Press).

He was Principal Investigator of projects funded by competitive grants including twice from General Research Fund (GRF) of the Hong Kong Research Grant Council. He has successfully supervised (as Chief Supervisor) five PhD students to completion. Their topics span a wide array, including animated agents for online learning, chatbots for mental health, smart tourism experience, ambient media design, and Chinese design semantics.

Before joining academia, Chow has had extensive work experience in film, animation, broadcast, and multimedia productions.