His research interests are in machine learning, statistics and optimization and the application of machine learning to problems in bioinformatics, computer vision and other fields in computer science and the natural sciences. His work and that of his students got best paper awards at the top machine learning conferences: COLT 2005, AISTATS 2007 and NIPS 2008. In 2011 he received the German Pattern Recognition Award and in 2012 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. He has been area chair for NIPS, ICML, AISTATS and COLT and program chair of GCPR 2013. Since 2013 he is action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research.