He studied computer science at the University of Saarland, where he graduated in 1993. Afterwards, he became a PhD student at the Department of Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm. During this period he worked at the DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology Speech Recognition Group. He received a PhD in computer science in 2000 with his work on associative computation. He has since worked in the field of fMRI as a researcher with an interdisciplinary group, Department of Psychiatry III Ulm, changing to F&K Delvotec bonding machines where he led the development of a diagnostic expert system. From 2004 to 2005 he was the scientific director of MITI research group Klinikum rechts der Isar of the Technical University Munich. Since 2006, he is a researcher of INESC-ID. Since 2009 he is a member of the Group of AI for People and Society (gaips).