Rina Dechter (Hebrew: רינה דכטר; born August 13, 1950) is a distinguished professor of computer science[1] in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute in 1976, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985 as a student of Judea Pearl.

She became a senior lecturer in computer science at the Technion from 1988 to 1990, after which she moved to the University of California, Irvine, where she became a full professor in 1996.

[12] Dechter received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the United States National Science Foundation in 1991, became a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in 1994, and received an award for research excellence from the Association of Constraint Programming in 2007.

[5] In 2013, she was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, cited "for contributions to the algorithmic foundations of automated reasoning with constraint-based and probabilistic information.