As many of you know, every year, we have an International Workshop on

Constraint Programming and Decision Making CoProd.

This is just to let you know that the next CoProd'2016, the 9th

International Workshop on Constraint Programming and Decision

Making, is scheduled to be in Uppsala, Sweden, on Sunday September

25, 2016, right before the 17th International Symposium on

Scientific Computing, Computer Arithmetic, and Verified Numerical

Computation SCAN'2016, Uppsala, Sweden, September 26-30, 2016.

Please mark your calendars and plan to come.

We plan to have extended abstracts distributed on site and

published online. Extended versions of selected papers from these

workshop will be considered for edited books published by Springer

Verlag; the first such book (based on previous workshops) appeared

in 2014; the second book has been recently submitted to Springer,

and the third book is in plans.

The details about this series of international workshops can be

found at the CoProd website http://coprod.constraintsolving.com

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Scope:

Constraint programming techniques are important components of

intelligent systems. They constitute a declarative and efficient

methodology to represent and solve many practical problems. They

have been applied successfully to a number of fields, such as

scheduling of air traffic, software engineering, networks

security, chemistry, and biology. Despite the proved usefulness of

these techniques, they are still under-utilized in real-life

applications. One reason is the perceived lack of effective

communication between constraint programming experts and domain

practitioners about constraints, in general, and their use in

decision making, in particular.

Objectives of CoProD:

* To present advances in constraint solving, optimization,

  decision making, and related topics.

* To develop a network of researchers interested in constraint

  techniques, in particular researchers and practitioners that

  use numeric and symbolic approaches (or a combination of

  them) to solve constraint and optimization problems.

* To address the gap between the great capacity of these

  techniques and their limited use.

CoProD aims at encouraging presentation and discussion of on-going

work. In particular, please note that there is room for

presentation of ideas, as opposed to results only. It also aims at

facilitating networking opportunities as well as

cross-fertilization between the approaches used in the different

attending communities.

Therefore, besides active researchers in decision making and

constraint programming techniques, we expect to have a wide

attendance of domain scientists – whose input is highly valued in

this workshop.

CoProD workshops have the potential to impact communities by

easing collaborations and therefore the emergence of new

techniques, and by creating a network of interest.

Topics of interest (not limited to):

* Programs and algorithms reliability

* Algorithms and applications of:

  o Constraint solving, including symbolic-numeric algorithms

    and soft constraints

  o Optimization: e.g., global, robust, multi-objective

  o Interval arithmetic

* Description of domain applications that:

  o Require new decision making techniques

  o Implement decision making techniques

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The previous editions of CoProD featured invited talks by highly

recognized experts, such as:

* Purushotham Bangalore, CIS department, University of Alabama at

  Birmingham

* Stefano Bistarelli, University of Perugia, Italy

* Alessandro Dal Palu, University of Parma, Italy

* Rina Dechter, Information and Computer Sciences, University of

  California Irvine

* Juan Carlos Figueroa, Universidad Distrtal de Bogota, Colombia

* Patty Hough, Sandia National Lab, Livermore, California

* Luc Jaulin, The Ecole Nationale Superieure de Techniques Avancees

  de Bretagne ENSTA-Bretagne, Brest, France

* Vyacheslav V. Kalashnikov, Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey

  (ITESM), Nuevo Leon, Mexico and Central Economics and

  Mathematics Institute (CEMI), Moscow, Russia

* Nataliya I. Kalashnykova, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon

  (UANL), Nuevo Leon, Mexico

* Francois Modave, Texas Tech Health Center, El Paso, Texas

* Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New

  Mexico

* James Raynolds, College of Nanoscale and Engineering, SUNY

  Albany

* Bart Selman, CS department, Cornell University

* Yaroslav D. Sergeyev, Università della Calabria, Italy

* Sergey Shary, Novosibirsk State University, Russia

* Young Jun Son, The University of Arizona, Tucson

* Xiaobai Sun, Duke University

* Leticia Velazquez, The University of Texas at El Paso

Submissions are expected in the form of extended abstracts of at

least 2 pages and no more than 5 pages (in general, closer to 2

pages for ideas, to 5 pages for results), formatted using the

standard LNCS/LNAI format (see instructions at

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). The title page

should include the name, address, and email address of each author

as well as a list of keywords.

Submissions have to be sent in pdf format AND LaTeX format to

mceberio (at) utep (dot) edu. A contact author should be specified

in the submission email. The deadline for submissions is May 1,

2016. Authors of accepted abstracts are expected to participate

and present their work at the workshop.

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Important dates:

* June 1, 2016: deadline for abstract submission

* July 1, 2016: notification of acceptance

* August 1, 2016: camera-ready copy of abstracts due

* September 25, 2016: workshop

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Organization:

  Martine Ceberio, University of Texas at El Paso,

    mceberio / utep (dot) edu

  Vladik Kreinovich, University of Texas at El Paso,

    vladik / utep (dot) edu