Alcides Fonseca, LASIGE integrated member, has organized and delivered a talk at the Program Synthesis Workshop, an affiliated workshop of the The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2026), which was held in San José, Costa Rica, 13 – 17 July, 2026.

Program Synthesis (PS) is the task of automatically generating executable programs from high-level specifications, such as logical constraints, input-output examples, or natural language descriptions. Inside the evolutionary community, PS is often seen as an established application of Genetic Programming (GP), but the broader PS community has developed a variety of different approaches, ranging from program enumeration with constraints, to Monte-Carlo tree search, to Large Language Models (LLMs). In recent years, hybrid approaches combining different techniques have begun to emerge, pushing PS towards better and better results.

A recent publication in the 2025 Genetic Programming: Theory and Practice conference, advocated for building a bridge between the evolutionary community and non-evolutionary approaches to PS. Following this idea, this workshop aimed to encourage the evolutionary community to focus more on PS, at the same time, creating bridges with other PS approaches, in the hope of obtaining even more performing hybrid forms.