Tsan-sheng Hsu studied at the National Taiwan University, from 1981 to 1985, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Sciences and graduated first rank in the class. After graduation, he served the compulsory two-year military service as an army infantry officer. From August 1987 to July 1988, he was a teaching assistant and a computer system manager at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. He then entered the Ph.D. program of the University of Texas at Austin in September 1988. He received a Master of Science in Computer Sciences degree in 1990 and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences in 1993.
He joined the Institute of Information Science (IIS), Academia Sinica as an assistant research fellow in October 1993. He was an associate research fellow between March 1997 and June 2003, and is a tenured full research fellow since June 2003. He also served Deputy Director of IIS from August 2002 to June 2004. Between February 15, 2008 and August 15, 2010, he was Director of Academia Sinica Computing Center (ASCC). Since 2019, he is Editor in Chief for Journal of Information Science and Engineering.
Dr. Hsu was a member of the 1984 Taiwan Programming Contest champion team and was elected as a member of the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society in 1985. He was also a recipient of several distinguished scholarships which includes the MCD fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin and the IBM graduate fellowship. In 1993, he won Bert Kay Dissertation Award from the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin. In 2003, he received Academia Sinica Research Award for Junior Research Investigators.
Dr. Hsu's research interest includes classical computer games, data intensive computing, graph theory and its applications, data privacy, and the design, analysis, implementation and performance evaluation of sequential and parallel algorithms. He is a member of ACM and ACM SIGACT, and a senior member of IEEE Computer Society. He is also a life member of IICM and TCGA.