The 65th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2024), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held in Chicago, IL, USA October 27— October 30, 2024. 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, algorithmic game theory, algorithms and data structures, analysis of Boolean functions, approximation algorithms, average-case complexity, computational applications of logic, combinatorics, computational complexity, communication complexity, circuit complexity, combinatorial optimization, computational game theory, computational geometry, computational learning theory, continuous optimization, cryptography, foundations of machine learning, online algorithms, optimization, parallel and distributed algorithms, parameterized algorithms, randomized algorithms, sublinear algorithms, streaming algorithms, quantum computing, pseudorandomness and derandomization, foundations of fairness and privacy, and theoretical aspects of areas such as networks, 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://focs24.hotcrp.com/ .

You can download a PDF version of the FOCS 2024 CFP here.
Important dates

Submission server open


March 1, 2024

Full paper submission deadline


April 4, 2024 at 8pm ET

Notification


July 1, 2024

Conference


October 27 — October 30, 2024
Submission format

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 2024 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 PC chair) 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
Submission instructions

Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing).

Please submit using this link: https://focs24.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:

Family member or close friend.
Ph.D. advisor or advisee (no time limit), or postdoctoral or undergraduate mentor or mentee within the past five years.
Person with the same affiliation.
Person involved in an alleged incident of harassment. (It is not required that the incident be reported.)
Reviewer owes author a favor (e.g., recently requested a reference letter).
Frequent or recent collaborator (within the last 2 years) whom you believe cannot objectively review your work.

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.
Prior and simultaneous submission

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 2024, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS 2024. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same) abstract to FOCS 2024 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.
Machtey Award

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.
Presentation of accepted papers

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.
Program Committee

Daniel Alabi, Columbia

Nima Anari, Stanford

Maryam Aliakbarpour, Rice

Xiaotie Deng, Peking University

Jelena Diakonikolas, Wisconsin

Alina Ene, BU

Funda Ergun, Indiana

Vipul Goyal, NTT Research

Sean Hallgren, Penn State

Russell Impagliazzo, UCSD

Varun Kanade, Oxford

Ravi Kannan, CMU

Bhavana Kanukurthi, IISc

Lap Chi Lau, Waterloo

Francois Le Gall, Nagoya

Andrea Lincoln, BU

Yang P. Liu, IAS and CMU

Daniel Lokshtanov, UCSB

Meena Mahajan, IMSc

Yury Makarychev, TTIC

Tal Malkin, Columbia

Dana Moshkovitz, UT Austin

Anand Natarajan, MIT

Alantha Newman, CNRS

Noam Nisan, Hebrew University

Huy Nguyen, Northeastern

Rafail Ostrovsky, UCLA

Ioannis Panageas, UC Irvine

Will Perkins, Georgia Tech

Prasad Raghavendra, Berkeley

Victor Reis, IAS

Rahul Santhanam, Oxford

Mohit Singh, Georgia Tech

Daniel Stefankovic, Rochester

David Steurer, ETH

Xiaorui Sun, UIC

Ewin Tang, Berkeley

Kavitha Telikepalli, TIFR Mumbai

Vera Traub, Bonn

Chris Umans, Caltech

Vinod Vaikuntanathan, MIT

Santosh Vempala, Georgia Tech (chair)

Adrian Vetta, McGill

Yusu Wang, UCSD

Andre Wibisono, Yale

Mihalis Yannakakis, Columbia

Huacheng Yu, Princeton