The 64th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held in Santa Cruz, CA, USA November 6—November 9, 2023 at the Hotel Paradox. Information about previous conferences can be found at the FOCS Conference Archive.
Papers presenting new and original research on theory of computation are sought. Typical but not exclusive topics of interest include: algorithmic coding theory, algebraic computation, algorithmic graph theory, algorithms and data structures, analysis of Boolean functions, approximation algorithms, computational applications of logic, combinatorics, computational complexity including communication complexity and circuit complexity, computational game theory, computational geometry, computational learning theory, cryptography, foundations of machine learning, online algorithms, optimization, parallel and distributed algorithms, parameterized algorithms, sublinear algorithms, streaming algorithms, quantum computing, randomness in computing, and theoretical aspects of areas such as networks, privacy, information retrieval, computational biology, and databases. Papers that broaden the reach of the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation and analysis, are encouraged.
Please submit using this link: https://focs23.hotcrp.com/
Abstracts, to be submitted by the abstract submission deadline, should consist of the title of the paper, and a brief abstract summarizing the paper’s contributions. Full submissions, submitted by the full paper submission deadline, should contain the complete paper. There is no page limit and authors are encouraged to use the “full version” of their paper as the submission. The submission should contain within the initial ten pages following the title page a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of the paper’s importance within the context of prior work and a description of the key technical and conceptual ideas used to achieve its main claims. The submission should be addressed to a broad spectrum of theoretical computer science researchers. Proofs must be provided which can enable the main mathematical claims of the paper to be fully verified. Although there is no bound on the length of a submission, material other than the abstract, references, and the first ten pages will be read at the committee’s discretion. Authors are encouraged to put the references at the very end of the submission. The submission should be typeset using 11-point or larger fonts, in a single-column, single-space (between lines) format with ample spacing throughout and 1-inch margins all around, on letter-size (8 1/2 x 11 inch) paper. Submissions deviating significantly from these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.
FOCS 2023 will use double-blind reviewing, and as such, submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. In particular, authors’ names, affiliations, and email addresses should not appear at the beginning or in the body of the submission. Authors should not include obvious references that reveal their own identity, and should ensure that any references to their own related work are in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”).
The purpose of this double-blind process is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, and not to make it impossible for them to discover who the authors are if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For example, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web, submit them to arXiv, and give talks on their research ideas.
Submissions by PC members are allowed. If any of the authors of a submission is a PC member, this should be indicated in the submission form by checking the corresponding box.
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).
Please submit using this link: https://focs23.hotcrp.com/
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.
The conference will follow SIGACT’s policy on prior publication and simultaneous submissions. Work that has been previously published in another conference proceedings or journal, or which is scheduled for publication prior to December 2023, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS 2023. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same) abstract to FOCS 2023 and to another conference with published proceedings or journal is not allowed. The program committee may interact with program chairs of other (past or future) conferences to find out about closely related submissions. Notwithstanding the above, works that were previously published or announced in another journal or conference with a significantly different format, content, and audience than FOCS might still be considered at the PC’s discretion; in such cases authors should contact the program chair prior to submission.
The Machtey award will be given to the best paper or papers written solely by one or more students. An abstract is eligible if all authors are full-time students at the time of submission. This should be indicated at the time of submission. All submissions are eligible for the Best Paper award. The committee may decide to split the awards between multiple papers, or to decline to make an award.
One author of each accepted paper will be expected to present the work at the conference. Authors are expected to contact the program chair before submission in case insufficient travel funds, family circumstances or external travel restrictions could prevent them from attending the conference.
Amir Abboud | Weizmann Institute of Science |
Pankaj K. Agarwal | Duke University |
Sepehr Assadi | Rutgers University & University of Waterloo |
Nikhil Bansal | University of Michigan |
Arnab Bhattacharyya | National University of Singapore |
Antonio Blanca | Penn State University |
Arkadev Chattopadhyay | Tata Institute of Fundamental Research |
Shuchi Chawla | UT Austin |
Shiri Chechik | Tel-Aviv University |
Gil Cohen | Tel-Aviv University |
Vincent Cohen-Addad | Google Research |
Costis Daskalakis | MIT & Archimedes AI |
Yuval Filmus | Technion |
Sebastian Forster | University of Salzburg |
András Gilyén | Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest, Hungary |
Mohsen Ghaffari | MIT |
Yannai Gonczarowski | Harvard University |
Rishab Goyal | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Martin Grohe | RWTH Aachen University |
Aayush Jain | Carnegie Mellon University |
Valentine Kabanets | Simon Fraser University |
Gautam Kamath | University of Waterloo |
Thomas Kesselheim | University of Bonn |
Valerie King | University of Victoria |
Gillat Kol | Princeton University |
Pravesh Kothari | Carnegie Mellon University |
Michal Koucky | Charles University |
Katrina Ligett | Hebrew University |
Nutan Limaye | IT University of Copenhagen |
Huijia Lin | University of Washington |
Alex Lombardi | Simons Institute and UC Berkeley |
Shachar Lovett | UC San Diego |
Dániel Marx | CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security |
Raghu Meka | UC Los Angeles |
Dieter van Melkebeek | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Ankur Moitra | MIT |
Shay Moran | Technion, Google Research |
Danupon Nanongkai | Max Planck Institute for Informatics |
Aleksandar Nikolov | University of Toronto |
Ryan O’Donnell | Carnegie Mellon University |
Rafael Oliveira | University of Waterloo |
Shayan Oveis Gharan | UW Seattle |
Debmalya Panigrahi | Duke University |
Chris Peikert | University of Michigan |
Richard Peng | University of Waterloo |
Seth Pettie | University of Michigan |
Sofya Raskhodnikova | Boston University |
Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury | UIUC |
Dana Ron | Tel Aviv University |
Noga Ron-Zewi | University of Haifa |
Thomas Rothvoss | University of Washington |
Aviad Rubinstein | Stanford |
Sushant Sachdeva | University of Toronto |
Barna Saha | UC San Diego |
Amit Sahai | UC Los Angeles |
Shubhangi Saraf | University of Toronto |
Aaron Sidford | Stanford |
Noah Stephens-Davidowitz | Cornell |
Madhu Sudan | Harvard University |
Thomas Vidick | California Institute of Technology & Weizmann Institute of Science |
Aravindan Vijayaraghavan | Northwestern University |
Omri Weinstein | Hebrew University |
Daniel Wichs | Northeastern University & NTT Research |
Andreas Wiese | Technical University of Munich |
Ronald de Wolf | QuSoft, CWI & University of Amsterdam |
Mark Zhandry | NTT Research |