| 1976-1978 | Chairman of Computer Science Department, Saarbrücken |
| 1987-1989 | Chairman of Computer Science Department, Saarbrücken |
| 1986-1988 | Speaker Sonderforschungsbereich 124, VLSI-Entwurfsmethoden und Parallelität |
| 1993-1999 | Member of the Senate, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German National Science Foundation) |
| 1993-2000 | Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) |
| 1993-1996 | Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, Siemens Corporate Research |
| 1994-1997 | Prime Contractor, EU-Project ALCOM |
| 1995-1998 | Member of the Senate, Helmholtz Gesellschaft der Großforschungseinrichtungen (National Research Labs) |
| 1998-2000 | Prime Contractor, EU-Project GALIA |
| 1998-2004 | Member of Board of Trustees, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley |
| 2001 | International Review Panel, UK research in Computer Science, Report |
| 2001 | Review Committee, Computer Science Department, ETH Zürich |
| 2001-2002 | Vice Chairman, Chemisch-Physikalisch-Technische Sektion der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft |
| 2002 | Chairman, Review Committee, Computer Science Department, Humboldt University, Berlin |
| 2002-2008 | Vice President, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft |
| 2002-2014 | Member of Senate, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft |
| 2005 | Review Committee, CWI, Amsterdam |
| 2006 | Review Committee, EPSRC ICT-Review |
| 2006-2012 | Board of Governors, Jacobs University Bremen |
| 2008-present | Principal Investigator, Cluster of Excellence, Multimodal Computing and Interaction |
| 2009-present | Joint Advisory Board, Carnegie Mellon, Qatar |
| 2009-2017 | Chairman of the Scientific Board and Member of the Board of Trustees, IST Austria |
| 2010-present | Co-Director, Indo Max Planck Center for Computer Science
(IMPECS) |
| 2011-2014 | Scientific Advisory Board, Simons Foundation |
| 2014-2016 | Award Committee, KNAW Academy Professorship |
| 2014-2017 | Award Committee, Goedel Prize |
| 2015-2016 | Scientific Advisory Board, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing |
| 2015-2017 | Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of INRIA |
| 2015-2017 | Award Committee, ESA Test-of-Time Award |
| 2016-present | European Research Council |
