He is an ACM and an IEEE fellow, and he is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, as well as a trustee emeritus of the VLDB Endowment. He received the Ib Henriksen Research Award 2001 for his research in mainly temporal data management, Telenor’s Nordic Research Award 2002 for his research in mobile services, the Villum Kann Rasmussen Award for Technical and Scientific Research 2011 for his general research contributions, and the 2019 IEEE TCDE Impact Award for contributions to temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal data management. Most recently, he received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.

He serves 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. He chairs the scientific advisory board of the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI), he serves on the scientific advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for informatics, Saarbruecken, and he is president of the steering committee of the Swiss National Research Program on Big Data, NRP 75.

He is an Area Editor (temporal databases) for the Encyclopedia of Database Systems. He was Editor-in-Chief of ACM TODS and from 2014 to 2020 and an Editor-in-Chief of The VLDB Journal from 2008 to 2014, and he serves or has served on the editorial boards of ACM TSAS, ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, and the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He was PC chair or co-chair for SSTD 2001, EDBT 2002, VLDB 2005, MobiDE 2006, MDM 2007, DMSN 2008, TIME 2008, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2011, AP Web 2012, IEEE ICDE 2013, DASFAA 2014, IC2E 2015, and SSTD 2019.