Hans-Peter Kriegel
Hans-Peter Kriegel is a computer scientist whose data mining work includes clustering, outlier detection, and spatial indexing. He earned a doctorate at Karlsruhe in 1976 and completed a habilitation at Dortmund in 1982. He held professorships at Würzburg and Bremen before joining LMU Munich in 1991. His research included the R*-tree, DBSCAN, OPTICS, and Local Outlier Factor; ACM named him a Fellow in 2009, he received the IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award in 2013, and ACM SIGKDD’s Innovation Award in 2015. He is a professor emeritus at LMU Munich, a role he took in 2014.
- Now at
- LMU Munich
- Works
- 429
- Citations
- 69,636
- h-index
- 76
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1976–1982
Doctorate and habilitation
He earns a doctorate at Karlsruhe in 1976 and completes a habilitation in computer science at Dortmund in 1982.
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1982–1991
Professorships before Munich
After professorships at Würzburg and Bremen, he joins LMU Munich as Professor of Informatics in 1991.
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1990–1996
Spatial search and DBSCAN
He develops the R*-tree as a dynamic spatial index for fast searches of multidimensional objects in 1990. He presents DBSCAN in a 1996 KDD paper on clustering large spatial databases with noise.
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1999–2000
OPTICS and local outliers
His DBSCAN work leads to OPTICS, which identifies clustering structure in 1999, and to Local Outlier Factor (LOF), which identifies density-based local outliers in 2000.
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2009
An ACM Fellowship
ACM elects him a Fellow in 2009 for contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining, similarity search, spatial data management, and access methods for high-dimensional data.
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2013
An IEEE ICDM award
He receives the 2013 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award for work in data mining.
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2015
A SIGKDD Innovation Award
He receives the 2015 SIGKDD Innovation Award for contributions to clustering, outlier detection, and high-dimensional data analysis.
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As of October 2026
Professor emeritus at LMU
LMU lists him among its emeriti as of October 2026. He joins LMU as Professor of Informatics in 1991 and becomes professor emeritus in April 2014.
Sources and credits
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