He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics under Valentino Braitenberg.

In 1996 he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" written under the tutelage of Christoph von der Malsburg.

[7] Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software.

[8] Face filters, now ubiquitous on mobile phones, were launched for the first time by Neven Vision on the networks of NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Japan in 2003.

The concept of adversarial patterns originated in his group when he tasked Christian Szegedy with a project to modify the pixel inputs of a deep neural network to lower the activity of select output nodes.

In 2006 Neven started to explore the application of quantum computing to hard combinatorial problems arising in machine learning.

In 2014 he invited John M. Martinis and his group at UC Santa Barbara to join the lab to start a fabrication facility for superconducting quantum processors.