The 9th Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2015) will be held during December 18-20, 2015 in Houston, Texas, USA. Original research papers in the areas of combinatorial optimization and its applications are solicited. In addition to theoretical results, we are particularly interested in submissions that report on experimental and applied research of general algorithmic interest. Special consideration will be given to research that is motivated by real-world problems. Experimental and applied papers are expected to show convincingly the usefulness and efficiency of the algorithms discussed in a practical setting.

The topics include, but are not limited to:
Algorithms and Data Structures
Approximation Algorithms
Operation Research
Communication Network Optimization
Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks
Optimal Resource Management
Social Networks
Complex Network Optimization
Bioinformatics
Computational Algebra
Computational Geometry
Computational Biology
Computational Financing
Computational Game Theory
Computational Learning Theory
Computational Number Theory
Graph Theory
Graph Search
Distributed Computational Systems
Urban Transportation Networks
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Scheduling

Important Dates
Submission: July 15, 2015
Notification of Acceptance: Aug. 15, 2015
Final Version Submission: Sep. 1, 2015

Paper Submission
The submission should contain scholarly exposition of ideas, techniques, and results, including the motivation and a clear comparison with related work. The length of the submission should not exceed twelve pages in LNCS style. Submitted papers must describe work not previously published. They must not be submitted simultaneously to any other conference with refereed proceedings or to journals. We regard the following case as a simultaneous submission. Submission of drafts which contain the essentially same results from papers under review in other conferences or journals at the moment of the submission. Only electronic submission will be allowed via the Springer Online Conference System.

Publication
The conference proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. After the conference, selected papers will be published in special issues of journals: Algorithmica, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Social Networks.

Awards
The Best Paper and the Best Student Paper will be awarded. A paper is eligible for the Best Student Paper if all authors are full-time students at the time of submission. To indicate that a submission is eligible, please add the phrase "Eligible for best student paper" as the last sentence in the "Abstract" field in the web form on the submission server as well as in the paper.

General co-Chairs
Wei Wayne Li, Texas Southern University
Weili Wu, University of Texas at Dallas

Program Committee co-Chairs
Zaixin Lu, Marywood University
Donghyun Kim, North Carolina Central University
Ding-Zhu Du, University of Texas at Dallas

Please send all concerns and questions to the COCOA 2015 email address:
cocoa15.chairs@gmail.com