Rita Dechter

Rina Dechter is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA (1985), an MS in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel (1975), and aBS in Mathematics and Statistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1973). Dechter's research centers on computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation including search, constraint processing and probabilistic reasoning. She is the author of Constraint Processing published by Morgan Kaufmann (2003), and of Reasoning with Probabilistic and Deterministic Graphical Models: Exact Algorithms published by Morgan and Claypool Publishers (2013, second ed. 2019). She has authored and coauthored almost 200 research papers. Dechter is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (1994), of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2013), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2021), and was a Radcliffe Fellow from 2005 to 2006. She received the Association of Constraint Programming (ACP) Research Excellence Award (2007), and a Classic AI Paper Award for a paper co-authored by Itay Meiri and Judea Pearl. She served as a co-editor-in-chief of Artificial Intelligence from 2011 to 2018. She also served on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence, Constraints Journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Dechter served as program chair or conference chair of several conferences including Constraint Programming in 2000, AAAI in 2002, and Uncertainty in AI (UAI) in 2006 and 2007. She is the conference chair-elect of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)-2022.