The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence recently elevated Pascal Van Hentenryck to Fellow for his "significant contributions to constraint satisfaction and reasoning under uncertainty, the development of the widely used CHIP, Numerica, OPL, and Comet systems, and his pioneering role in the inception of constraint programming and its integration in operations research."
The AAAI Fellows program was started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Fellows' accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of artificial intelligence, to unusual accomplishments in artificial intelligence technology and AI applications.
"It is a great honor to share this distinction with so many brilliant minds in AI," said Pascal. "I would like to thank all my collaborators and students who have contributed to this honor in so many ways over so many years."
Pascal Van Hentenryck is professor of computer science at Brown University and the director of the department's optimization laboratory. Before coming to Brown in 1990, he spent four years at the European Computer-Industry Research Center (ECRC), where he was the main designer and implementor of the CHIP programming system, the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems. During the last 15 years, he developed a number of influential systems, including the Numerica system for global optimization, the optimization programming language OPL, and the programming language Comet which supports constraint-based local search, constraint programming and mathematical programming. These systems are described in books published by the MIT Press and have been licensed to industry. Pascal also implemented the generic abstract interpretation system GAIA.
Pascal is the recipient of an 1993 NSF National Young Investigator (NYI) award, the 2002 INFORMS ICS Award for research excellence at the interface between computer science and operations research, the 2006 ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, best paper awards at CP'03, CP'04, and IJCAI'07, and an IBM Faculty Award in 2004. In 2008, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the university of Louvain. He is also the author of five books and of more than 170 scientific papers.
Pascal joins the department's two other AAAI Fellows: Eugene Charniak and Tom Dean.
