18th International Workshop on Constraint Programming and Decision Making CoProD'2026,
March 13, 2026, El Paso, Texas, USA
(remote participation is possible)

The workshop will be held right before the Joint NAFIPS International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, Soft Computing and Explainable AI and 10th World Conference on Soft Computing NAFIPS 2026, El Paso, Texas, USA, March 14-16, 2026.

Location: AST Building, El Paso Community College, Valle Verde Campus, 919 Hunter Dr., El Paso, Texas.

Description

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, 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.

Who Should Participate:

Participation is encouraged from people doing research in the areas of decision making and constraint programming.
CoProD also aims at facilitating networking opportunities as well as cross-fertilization between the approaches used in different communities. Therefore, besides active researchers in decision making and constraint programming techniques, we expect to have a wide attendance and participation of domain scientists - whose input is highly valued in this workshop.
Submissions of ideas are also encouraged.

Proceedings / Publication

Submissions should take 2-5 page (a few more pages is OK), if possible, formatted using the Springer edited book format; see style file svmult.cls and an example of using this file (not related to CoProD): LaTeX original and the resulting pdf file. Accepted submissions of at least 4 pages will be published by Springer, as part of the proceedings of the NAFIPS 2026 conference.

Please send the source file(s) and the resulting pdf file to mceberio [at] utep [dot] edu and vladik [at] utep [dot] edu. A contact author should be specified in the submission email. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2026 (Let us know if you need a few more days). Authors of accepted submissions are expected to participate and present their work at the workshop.

Important dates

February 15, 2026: deadline for submissions
February 22, 2026: notification of acceptance
March 1, 2026: deadline for final versions of accepted submissions
March 13, 2026: workshop

Registration

For those who registered for the NAFIPS 2026 conference, this registration also covers participation in CoProD 2026.

Those who are not registered for NAFIPS 2026 and want to attend only the CoProD 2026 workshop, please pay the registration fee by using the following registration link https://christianservin.com/registration.html.

Registration fee is:

general registration fee $50
for students and retired professionals $25

Program


Each talk should take 20 minutes, leaving 5 minutes for questions
and comments

  8:30- 8:45 am opening
  8:45- 9:10 am Olga Kosheleva and Vladik Kreinovich
    The only award system that prevents cheating is linear
    pdf file
  9:10- 9:35 am Francisco Salazar Mendoza, Braulio Bracamontes,
      Carlos Gamez, Fernando Sepulveda, and Vladik Kreinovich
    Geometry of Gaudi Arches: Why Parabolic and Catenary Shapes?
    pdf file
  9:35-10:00 am Luis J. Franco, Andres Soto, Jose R. Chaidez, and
      Vladik Kreinovich
    Is Earth's tilt a resonance?
    pdf file
 10:00-10:20 am coffee break
 10:20-10:45 am Maria Lizeth Reyna Cruz, Martine Ceberio,
      Christoph Q. Lauter, Vladik Kreinovich, and
      Cecilia Alejandra Marquez Barraza
    Efficient First-Approximation Algorithms for Interval-Valued
      Regression, with Medical Applications in Mind
    pdf file
 10:45-11:10 am Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, and Vladik Kreinovich
    Is Constructivism Sufficient for Teaching? Experience of Machine
      Learning Says: "Not Always"
    pdf file
 11:10-11:35 am Min Xian, Olga Kosheleva, Martine Ceberio, and
      Vladik Kreinovich
    Why drop-max is effective in making convolutional neural networks
      (CNNs) more robust
    pdf file
 11:35-12:00 pm Dang Pham, Javier Molina, Olga Kosheleva, and
      Vladik Kreinovich
    Why Dolphins Age Slower in Small Social Groups and Age Faster in
      Larger Groups: A Possible Explanation Based on Decision Theory
    pdf file
 12:00- 1:10 pm lunch
  1:10- 1:35 pm Martine Ceberio, Olga Kosheleva, and Vladik Kreinovich
    How to Solve Real-Life Problems: Lessons from Air Force Leadership
    pdf file
  1:35- 2:00 pm Yahriel Guel
    Title TBD
  2:00- 2:20 pm coffee break
  2:20- 2:45 pm Abigail Galarza, Valeria D. Quintero Rosario,
      Christoph Lauter, Olga Lauter, Alex Mayer, and Benjamin Good
    Exploring AI-Assisted Translation and Climate Data Extraction
      from Alaskan Russian Missionary Diaries: Arctic Climate Research
    pdf file
  2:45- 3:10 pm Sebastian Vargas, James Hinojos, Jesus Ramirez, and
      Christian Servin
    Detecting and Defining Responsible Use of Generative AI in
      Introductory Computer Science
    pdf file
  3:10- 3:35 pm Md Nuruzzaman Sojib (tentative)
    Title TBD
  3:35- 4:00 pm Juan Puebla (tentative)
    Title TBD
  4:00- 4:05 pm closing

Organizers:

Martine Ceberio and Vladik Kreinovich
Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at El Paso
500 West University
El Paso, Texas 79968-0518, USA
mceberio [at] utep [dot] edu, vladik [at] utep [dot] edu

18th International Workshop on Constraint Programming and Decision Making CoProD'2026,March 13, 2026, El Paso, Texas, USA (remote participation is possible)