ICS Professor Among Three UC Irvine Researchers Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), is one of three UC Irvine professors elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 2025. The Academy spans a broad and multidisciplinary range of work, from the arts and humanities, to democracy and justice, energy and environment, global affairs, and science and technology, and works to “address critical challenges facing our global society.” Inducting members into the Academy “honors the excellence and leadership of exceptional people from all disciplines and practices.”

Dechter’s work is focused on automated reasoning in artificial intelligence with a particular focus on constraint satisfaction and satisfiability, combinatorial optimization, and probabilistic inference.
“I am deeply honored to have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recognizing my contributions to automated reasoning,” says Dechter. Automated reasoning aims to replicate aspects of human reasoning – such as planning, design and diagnosis, and applications such as scheduling, resource allocation, verifying hardware and software designs, as well as bioinformatics. “My research focuses on the computational challenge of these tasks, which often involve managing both hard and soft constraints as well as uncertain information.”

Earlier this year, Dechter organized a workshop on causal reasoning that brought together researchers from across Southern California and from Columbia University, to present on “recent advancements in causal reasoning and on future directions.” The workshop was organized as part of a $5M grant received from NSF in the fall of 2023, in which Dechter is one of 5 Co-PIs, to “improve AI-based causal decision-making.”

Tony Givargis, Chair of the Computer Science Department, shared: “Professor Dechter is a leading figure in artificial intelligence, widely recognized for her pioneering work in constraint processing, automated reasoning, and probabilistic graphical models. Her influential contributions have significantly advanced both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of AI across a range of scientific disciplines. I am delighted to congratulate Professor Dechter on her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.”

— Jenna Abrams