AMSTERDAM, March 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, is pleased to announce that Professor Rina Dechter of the University of California, Irvine, has accepted to join Professor Tony Cohn of the University of Leeds as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/artint). She succeeds Dr. Raymond Perrault of SRI International in that position.

Rina Dechter received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation including search, constraint processing and probabilistic reasoning. She has authored more than 100 research papers and the book Constraint Processing, published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2003. She is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence since 1994, was a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Science Fellow in 2005-2006 and received the 2007 Association of Constraint Programming (ACP) Research Excellence Award.

Professor Dechter expressed her appreciation of the contributions of her predecessor, Dr. Perrault, whose two terms as Co-Editor-in-Chief had profound and positive effects on the journal. "My own goals as Co-Editor-in-Chief are to continue and improve the journal along the trajectory introduced by Dr Perrault and Professor Cohn," she said. "I hope to achieve these goals by maintaining the journal's high scientific standards, by facilitating timely and informed review process, by broadening its scope and by promoting the AIJ sponsorship scheme in which Editorial Board funds are distributed for the benefit of the Artificial Intelligence community."