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 is the head of the Institute of Applied Informatics and directs the Intelligent Systems and Business Informatics research group. 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, configuring products and services, diagnosis and repair of processes as well as self-healing Web services. 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. 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. 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 Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.