Friday October, 3rd ? Saturday October, 4th Request for Event Funds PROJECT SUMMARY Organizer: Dr. Martine Ceberio Computer Science Department University of Texas at El Paso mceberio@utep.edu Constraint programming techniques are important components of intelligent systems. They have been applied successfully to a number of fields, such as scheduling of air traffic, software engineering, and networks security. Despite the proved usefulness of these techniques, they are under-utilized in real-life projects, mainly due to the lack of knowledge of researchers and practitioners from other fields about constraints in general and their use in decision making in particular. Constraint solving and optimization are my primary research areas. I have been on the program committees of several related international conferences. At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), I am leading a research group on constraints; we have been successfully collaborating with researchers from UTEP and from other schools in the US and abroad. In order to build upon our success, I am organizing a workshop at UTEP that will be focused on constraint programming and decision making. The objectives of the workshop are: 1) to draw together a network of researchers interested in constraint techniques, in particular researchers and practitioners that use numeric and symbolic approaches (or a combination) to solve constraints and optimization problems, and 2) to address the gap between the great capacity of these techniques and their limited use. Intellectual Merit. An expected outcome of the workshop is the definition of new directions for combining numeric and symbolic approaches in solving constraints and optimization problems in particular and in decision making in general. Such a workshop is much needed as there is little connection between actual practitioners and researchers in constraints and decision making, and also because it will be a unique opportunity to gather together preeminent researchers mainly focused on combining symbolic and numeric solving and decision methods. CoProD'08 has the potential to impact these communities by easing collaborations and therefore the emergence of new techniques, and by creating a network of interest. Broader Impact. CoProD'08 is scheduled back-to-back with a large bi-annual international conference, SCAN?2008, on Scientific Computing, Computer Arithmetic and Verified Numerical Computations (El Paso, 09/29-10/03/2008). As one of the main organizers of this conference, I have been actively encouraging the participation of the constraint community in this meeting. Out of 8 invited plenary talks, two talks will be given by leaders of the constraint community and we expect several dozens of constraint-related participants from all over the world at this meeting. This conference provides us with a unique opportunity to organize a workshop on constraints because many preeminent researchers from over the world will be present. CoProD'08 aims at impacting a broader range of people as a network of interest will be created and a webpage for this network will relay and advertise information about the members' research activities and collaborations. Moreover, local students will be involved in the organization of the workshop and will be given the opportunity to exhibit posters about their constraint-related work outside of the workshop room, and so will the students of the other attendees. The requested budget for this event is a total of $5,941.
