With the increasing presence and popularity of AI it is important to get the word out that constraint satisfaction is AI. While a strength of the field is its multi-disciplinary nature, it certainly has a ‘home’ — arguably its ‘primary residence’ 🙂 in the AI community. In fact, I’ve argued that constraints are ubiquitous in AI, to the point where they might even serve as a kind of “lingua franca” unifying the subfields of AI. In particular, constraint satisfaction has been used for machine learning and vice versa, and constraints resonate with other currently high profile topics in AI like explanation and human-centric AI.

Members of the constraints community have a very strong presence in the larger AI community. For example, Francesca Rossi, a former president of the ACP, is a past president of IJCAI and future president of AAAI, and Barry O’Sullivan, a former president of the ACP, is a past president of EurAI and a current member of the Executive Council of AAAI.