The 66th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2025), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held in Sydney, Australia, December 14-17. Information about previous conferences can be found at the FOCS Conference Archive.
Full submissions, submitted by the full paper submission deadline, should contain the abstract and the complete paper. The abstract should summarize the paper’s contributions. 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 2025 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 (other than the PC chairs) 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.
Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing). Please submit using this link: https://focs25.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 they 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. 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 2025, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS 2025. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same) abstract to FOCS 2025 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.
| Andris Ambainis | University of Latvia |
| Alexandr Andoni | Columbia University |
| Anurag Anshu | Harvard University |
| Sepehr Assadi | University of Waterloo |
| Ainesh Bakshi | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Omri Ben-Eliezer | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology |
| Elette Boyle | Reichman University and NTT Research |
| Niv Buchbinder | Tel-Aviv University |
| Eshan Chattopadhyay | Cornell University |
| Shuchi Chawla | University of Texas Austin |
| Shiri Chechik | Tel-Aviv University |
| Lijie Chen | University of California Berkeley |
| Sitan Chen | Harvard University |
| Xi Chen | Columbia University |
| Gil Cohen | Tel-Aviv University |
| Vincent Cohen-Addad | Google Research |
| Costis Daskalakis | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Anindya De | University of Pennsylvania |
| Mahsa Derakhshan | Northeastern University |
| Alina Ene | Boston University |
| Michal Feldman | Tel-Aviv University |
| Michael A. Forbes | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| Ankit Garg | Microsoft Research |
| Sumegha Garg | Rutgers University |
| Yannai Gonczarowski | Harvard University |
| Elena Grigorescu | University of Waterloo |
| Nika Haghtalab | University of California Berkeley |
| Pooya Hatami | Ohio State University |
| Sam Hopkins | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Michael Kapralov | École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Tali Kaufman | Bar-Ilan University |
| Nathan Klein | Boston University |
| Swastik Kopparty | University of Toronto |
| Robin Kothari | Google Quantum AI |
| Jason Li | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Nutan Limaye | IT University of Copenhagen |
| Yang Liu | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Shachar Lovett | University of California San Diego |
| Fermi Ma | University of California Berkeley |
| Sepideh Mahabadi | Microsoft Research |
| Tal Malkin | Columbia University |
| Pasin Manurangsi | Google Research |
| Dor Minzer | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Christopher Musco | New York University |
| Alantha Newman | Université Grenoble Alpes |
| Rotem Oshman (co-chair) | Tel-Aviv University and New York University |
| Shayan Oveis Gharan | University of Washington |
| Omer Paneth | Tel-Aviv University |
| Richard Peng | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Ran Raz (chair) | Princeton University |
| Robert Robere | McGill University |
| Ron Rothblum | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology |
| Sushant Sachdeva | University of Toronto |
| Rahul Santhanam | Oxford University |
| Shubhangi Saraf | University of Toronto |
| Thatchaphol Saranurak | University of Michigan |
| Raghuvansh Saxena | Tata Institute of Fundamental Research |
| Mark Sellke | Harvard University |
| Vatsal Sharan | University of Southern California |
| Mohit Singh | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Nicholas Spooner | Cornell University |
| Jukka Suomela | Aalto University |
| Ola Svensson | École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Avishay Tal | University of California Berkeley |
| Roei Tell | University of Toronto |
| Vinod Vaikuntanathan | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Paul Valiant | Purdue University |
| Thomas Vidick | École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and The Weizmann Institute of Science |
| Nicole Wein | University of Michigan |
| David Woodruff | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Mary Wootters | Stanford University |
| John Wright | University of California Berkeley |
| Or Zamir | Tel-Aviv University |