He wrote the book ''Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications'' (with Thomas Stützle), and his research is published widely in internationally leading journals and conference proceedings. In 2023 he received the ACM SIGKDD test-of-time award for his work on Auto-WEKA, together with Chris Thornton, Frank Hutter and Kevin Leyton-Brown. He also works in computer music, where he created the SALIERI music programming language and computer music system (with Thomas Helbich, Jürgen Kilian and Kai Renz) as well as GUIDO music notation (with Keith Hamel).