My general research interests are in data analytics and management, and much of my research concerns foundations for value creation from temporal, time-series, spatial, spatio-temporal, geo-textual, and multidimensional data, including data modeling and database design, data models and query languages, query and update processing, data mining, machine learning, and indexing.
I am Professor of Computer Science, and I direct Center for Data-Intensive Systems with co-director Torben Bach Pedersen.
During the late 1980s and the 1990s, I was at the computer science departments at University of Arizona (on sabbaticals) and University of Maryland (as a Ph.D. student) for about five years. During 2008 and 2009, I was at Google, Mountain View, working in the structured data research group headed by Alon Halevy. During 2010 to 2013, I was a Professor in Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. In August 2013, I returned to Aalborg University, where I had been a faculty member since the early 1990s. From January 2017 to November 2018, I was Ph.D. study director of the Ph.D. school Technical Doctoral School of IT and Design, an independent unit established by the Technical Faculty of IT and Design. Some 200 Ph.D. students were enrolled in the school.
I am an ACM Fellow (for contributions to temporal and spatio-temporal data management) and an IEEE Fellow (for contributions to temporal, spatio-temporal and mobile data management); and I am a member of the Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences.
I serve on the board of Villum Fonden, a major private funder of Danish research in the natural and technical sciences, and as vice-chair of the board of the Danish National Research Foundation, an independent public funding body with its own endowment. In Norway, I chair the scientific advisory board of the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI). At the end of 2023, I completed my term as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for informatics, Saarbruecken, Germany, and I completed my service as president of the steering committee of the Swiss National Research Program on Big Data, NRP 75.
I was Editor-in-Chief of ACM TODS from 2014 to 2020 and an Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal from 2008 to 2014.