Gerhard Friedrich is a chaired professor at the Universität Klagenfurt, Austria and received his PhD in computer science from the Vienna University of Technology. He directs the Intelligent Systems and Business Informatics research group. From May 2013 until December 2021 he also was Dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences.
Previously he managed the Department for Configuration and Diagnosis Systems at Siemens Austria, implementing numerous knowledge-based systems. Gerhard Friedrich also led many research projects and was a research fellow at Siemens Corporate Research and at the Stanford Research Institute.
His research interests include recommender systems, knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition and maintenance, automated configuration of products and services, automated planning and scheduling as well as automated diagnosis and repair of systems.
He has published many papers in highly-renowned journals in these areas, such as Artificial Intelligence, AI Magazine, Web Semantics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce as well as a book on recommender systems at Cambridge University Press which was translated in Japanese and Chinese.
Gerhard Friedrich served as program committee member for numerous distinguished conferences such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence or the WWW. He was an area chair at the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning 2012, and a senior PC member at the ACM Recommender Systems Conferences 2010, 2011, 2012 and a chair of the Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems – PAIS 2014. Gerhard Friedrich is an associate editor of AI Communications and the International Journal of Mass Customization. In 2012 he became a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Gerhard Friedrich was invited as a keynote speaker at several conferences and workshops. In 2015 he was the joint invited speaker at the 31st International Conference on Logic Programming and the 21st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. In 2016 he was the general chair of the 39th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence which was jointly organized with the Austrian Association for Artificial Intelligence.