Phd (1974) and Habilitation (1978) in Mathematics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich.

From 1979 - 1984  research at MIT, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley
as Heisenberg-Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

From 1982 - 1986 Associate Professor and from 1986 - 1993 Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Since 1991 Professor of Computer Science at the Graz University of  Technology in Austria, and 1992-2017 Head of the Institut fuer Grundlagen der Informationsverarbeitung (Institute of Theoretical Computer Science) at the Graz University of Technology.

Sloan Fellow at the Computational Neurobiology Lab of the Salk Institute (La Jolla, USA) during 1997/98.

From 9/2002 - 2/2003 and
from 4/2012 - 7/2012 Visiting Professor at the Brain-Mind Institute, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Since 2005 Adjunct Fellow of the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies (FIAS) 

From 2008 - 2012 Member of the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society.

Since 2013   Member of the Academia Europaea

2018: Co-Organizer of the Special Semester "The Brain and Computation" at the Simons Institute, University of California at Berkeley 

• Editor of Machine Learning, 1995 - 1997
• Member of the Editorial Board of Machine Learning, 1998 - 2000
• Editor of Archive for Mathematical Logic, 1987 - 2000
• Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 1992 - 2014
  
• Member of the Editorial Board of Neurocomputing, 1994 - 2007
  
• Member of the Editorial Board of Cognitive Neurodynamics, 2006 - present
• Editor of Biological Cybernetics, 2006 - present