Christian Bessiere is a French computer scientist and research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, the French national institute for research).[1] His laboratory is hosted by the University of Montpellier in France. He is known for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the area of constraint programming, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science.
Biography and career
Christian Bessiere received a doctorate (Ph.D.) in computer science in 1992.[2,8] In 2005, he was a founding member of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP), serving on its executive committee until 2009 and as its treasurer until 2007.[9,10,2] From 2021 to 2023, he was the president of the IJCAI Board of Trustees.[11] In 2024, together with Eugene Freuder and Francesca Rossi, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Scientific Organizations Coordinating Council (AISOCC).[12]
He has held several positions in the international scientific community, serving as the program chair of the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) in 2007, the organizing committee chair of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in 2012, and the program chair of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2020.[3,4,2] He was also an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) from 2008 to 2011, an associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal from 2011 to 2017, and has been a member of the advisory board of the Constraints journal since 2009.[6,8]
Bessiere was a member of the AAAI Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research, with English Wikipedia dating this to 2024 and French Wikipedia placing it in 2025.[13,15] In 2024, he gave a keynote speech at the UNESCO World Conference on Digital Education in Shanghai.[14] In 2025, he spoke at the panel on 'Artificial Intelligence: Risks and Global Regulation' at the World Peace Forum in Beijing.[15]
Honours and awards
In 2006, Bessiere was elected a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).[16] In 2012, his paper Arc consistency and arc consistency again received an honourable mention at the 'AAAI Classic Paper Award'.[18,17,20] In 2022, his paper An Optimal Coarse-grained Arc Consistency Algorithm received the 'AIJ Classic Paper Award'.[19]