Submissions to FOCS 2023 can be marked for the “Main Track” or the “Conjectures Track.” Submissions to the new Conjectures Track will be evaluated completely separately from submissions to the Main Track. There is no a priori acceptance quota for either track, or desired number of accepted papers: it will all depend on the quality of submissions only.
Papers submitted to the Conjectures Track should be focused on one or more conjectures, describe evidence for and against them, and motivate them through potential implications. The conjecture(s) can be novel to the paper, or they can be conjectures that have been formed in the past within a certain community. In the latter case, the origin of the conjecture(s) should be described in the submission: it is not required that authors of the paper are also at the origin of the conjecture(s), but if they are not, they should attribute them appropriately to the extent possible.
Papers submitted to the Conjectures Track will be evaluated based on the importance of the conjecture(s) to the relevant field within theoretical computer science and beyond, as argued in the submission. Evidence for the conjecture(s) and implications of the conjecture(s) should be provided to support this importance. Of course, conjectures that may open up a new field within theoretical computer science would also be very welcome.
Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing).
Detailed submission instructions will be posted soon.
The submission process will include a declaration of conflicts of interest, to help manage the double-blind review process. This information can only be seen by the program committee chair and thus cannot be used by the rest of the program committee to deanonymize authors. Please only include conflicts of interest as defined by SafeToC:
If an author believes that they have a valid reason for a conflict of interest not listed above, then he or she can contact the PC chair or any ToC advocate affiliated with this conference directly. Note that if the program chair has reason to doubt the validity of the claim of conflict of interest, then they may request that a ToC advocate confidentially verify the reason for the conflict. If authors are uncertain, they are encouraged to email the PC chair or a ToC advocate. The submission software asks for conflicts with PC members, and in addition contains a text form in which one can declare additional conflicts.
Authors are encouraged to also make full versions of their submissions freely accessible in an online repository such as the arXiv, ECCC, or the Cryptology ePrint archive. (Papers that are not written well enough for public dissemination are probably also not ready for submission to FOCS.) It is expected that authors of accepted papers will make their full papers, with proofs, publicly available by the camera-ready deadline.