The 60th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2019), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 9-12 (Saturday through Tuesday).

The conference seeks papers presenting new and original research on the theory of computation. Typical but not exclusive topics of interest include: algorithms and data structures, computational complexity, cryptography, computational learning theory, economics and computation, parallel and distributed algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry, computational applications of logic, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, optimization, randomness in computing, approximation algorithms, algorithmic coding theory, algebraic computation, and theoretical aspects of areas such as networks, privacy, information retrieval, computational biology, and databases. We encourage papers that broaden the reach of the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation and analysis.

Important Dates:

• Submission deadline: 3:00pm PDT, April 5, 2019.
• Notification: by July 1, 2019.
• Final version of accepted papers due: mid-August, 2019.

Submission format:

Submissions should start with a title page consisting of the title of the paper; each author’s name, affiliation, and email address; and an abstract of 1-2 paragraphs summarizing the paper’s contributions.

There is no page limit and the authors are encouraged to use a “full version” of their paper as the submission. The submission must contain within its first ten pages (after the title page) a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including discussion of its importance, prior work, and an outline (similar to a brief oral presentation) of key technical ideas and methods used to achieve the main claims. This part of the submission should be addressed to a broad spectrum of theoretical computer scientists, not solely to experts in the subarea.

The submission should include proofs of all central claims. Although there is no bound on the length of a submission, material other than the title page, 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. Submissions deviating significantly from these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.

All submissions will be treated as confidential, and will only be disclosed to the committee and their chosen sub-referees. In addition, the program committee may consult with journal editors and program chairs of other conferences about controversial issues such as parallel submissions.

Submission instructions:

Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing). Submissions will be judged solely on the basis of the paper submitted by the deadline; post-deadline revisions will not be allowed.

When you register your submission, you will, among other things, have to register an abstract in plain text. This abstract plays a prominent role in the evaluation process, e.g., it is displayed when the paper is discussed. It is therefore advised that you make sure that the plain text abstract reads well.

We will be implementing a new conflict of interest policy. For details, click on the submission server link, once it’s operational.

Submit your paper at the FOCS 2019 Submission Server here.

Online posting:

Authors are encouraged to post full versions of their submissions in a freely accessible online repository such as the arxiv, the 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.) We expect that authors of accepted papers will make full versions of their papers, with proofs, available before the conference begins. (This should be done in a manner consistent with the IEEE Copyright Policy.)

Prior and simultaneous submission:

Work that has been previously published in another conference proceedings or journal, or which has a chance of being published before the end of the conference, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS 2019. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same) extended abstract to FOCS 2019 and to another conference with published proceedings is not allowed. The only exceptions to this policy are prior or simultaneous publications appearing in the journals Science and Nature. If there are other submissions/publications with substantial overlap, then this should be disclosed on the title page.

Awards:

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. Eligibility 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 may decline to make an award.

Presentation of Accepted Papers:

One author of each accepted paper will be expected to present the work at the conference.

Program Committee:

Zeyuan Allen-Zhu	Microsoft Research AI
Andris Ambainis	University of Latvia
Alexandr Andoni	Columbia University
Adam Bouland	University of California, Berkeley
Karl Bringmann	Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Siu On Chan	Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shuchi Chawla	University of Wisconsin, Madison
Michael Elkin	Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Alina Ene	Boston University
Yuval Filmus	Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Fabrizio Grandoni	IDSIA, University of Lugano
Anupam Gupta	Carnegie Mellon University
Venkatesan Guruswami	Carnegie Mellon University
Daniel Kane	University of California, San Diego
Adam Klivans	University of Texas at Austin
Huijia (Rachel) Lin	University of Washington
Shachar Lovett	University of California, San Diego
Aleksandar Nikolov	University of Toronto
Rotem Oshman	Tel Aviv University
Shayan Oveis Gharan	University of Washington
Debmalya Panigrahi	Duke University
Richard Peng	Georgia Tech & Microsoft Research
Nitin Saxena	Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
Tselil Schramm	Harvard University and MIT
Daniel Stefankovic	University of Rochester
Avishay Tal	Stanford University
Santosh Vempala	Georgia Institute of Technology
Daniel Wichs	Northeastern University
Huacheng Yu	Harvard University
David Zuckerman (chair)	University of Texas at Austin

Contact Information:

General Chair: Yuval Rabani, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, yrabani@cs.huji.ac.il

Program Committee Chair: David Zuckerman, University of Texas at Austin, focs19chair@gmail.com

Local Arrangements Chair: Michael Dinitz, Johns Hopkins University, mdinitz@cs.jhu.edu

ToC Advocates (for harassment issues): Sandy Irani, UC Irvine, irani@ics.uci.edu, and Martin Farach-Colton, Rutgers University, martin@farach-colton.com