Gerhard Friedrich is a full professor at the Universität of Klagenfurt, Austria, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology. He heads the Intelligent Systems and Business Informatics research group. From May 2013 to December 2021 he was Dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences.

Previously, he headed the Configuration and Diagnostic Systems Department at Siemens Austria, where he implemented numerous knowledge-based systems. Gerhard Friedrich also led multiple research projects and was a research fellow at Siemens Corporate Research and 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, and automated diagnosis and repair of systems.

He has published extensively in these areas in prestigious journals 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 published by Cambridge University Press and translated into Japanese and Chinese.

Gerhard Friedrich has served as a program committee member for numerous prestigious conferences, including the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the WWW. He was an area chair of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning 2012, a senior PC member of 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. He was elected a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2012 and a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association in 2023.

Gerhard Friedrich has been 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, organized jointly with the Austrian Association for Artificial Intelligence.