UC Irvine computer science professor Rina Dechter has been awarded the 2007 Association for Constraint Programming Research Excellence award for her record of sustained high-quality research in the area of constraint processing. Her work, which focuses on computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation, has produced influential results and impacted Artificial Intelligence research. Dechter, who wrote the 2003 book Constraint Processing, has authored more than 100 research papers.