Call for Papers
STOC 2022
Theory Fest
June 20-24, 2022
Rome, Italy
Submission Deadline: Thursday, November 4, 2021, 4:59pm EDT.

The 54th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), will be held in Rome, Italy.

STOC will be part of Theory Fest, an expanded program of invited talks, tutorials, poster sessions, and workshops from Monday, June 20 to Friday, June 24, 2022. Papers presenting new and original research on the theory of computation are sought. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: algorithms and data structures, computational complexity, randomness in computing, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, approximation algorithms, cryptography, computational learning theory, continuous and discrete optimization, economics and computation, parallel and distributed algorithms, quantum computing, algorithmic coding theory, computational geometry, computational applications of logic, algebraic computation, and computational and foundational aspects of areas such as machine learning, fairness, privacy, networks, data management, databases and computational biology. Papers that extend the reach of the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation and analysis, are encouraged. The program committee will make every effort to consider a broad range of areas.

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 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, table of contents, 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.

Authors are encouraged to include hyperlink cross-referencing for bibliographic entries, theorems, sections, and so on, using for example the hyperref package. If helpful, a table of contents may be added on a page immediately following the title page; this will not count towards the first ten pages.

Recommended best practices for citations: Authors are asked to avoid "et al." in citations in favor of an equal mention of all authors' surnames. If the number of authors is large, consider writing "\cite{XYZ} show..." instead of "X et al. show". Bibliographic references should preferably be alphanumeric (e.g., the first letters of the authors' surnames (or at least the first three followed by a +) followed by year of publication, instead of just a numerical reference. If using BibTeX, this can be accomplished by using \bibliographystyle{alpha}.

PC Member Submissions: 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 clicking the corresponding bullet.

Conflict of Interest Policy: STOC 2022 will use the following Conflict of Interest Policy, as suggested by SafeToC (see here). Upon submission, authors are given the opportunity to declare conflicts of interest. They should limit this declaration to the following categories:

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) who you believe cannot objectively review your work.

If you are unsure about a conflict in which a reviewer may have positive bias towards your paper, we recommend erring on the side of not declaring it since PC members and sub-reviewers will be also asked if they feel that they can fairly evaluate your paper. 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 he/she may request that a ToC advocate confidentially verify the reason for the conflict. Falsely declared conflicts (i.e., do not satisfy one of the listed reasons) risk rejection without consideration of merit. 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.

Submission Instructions: Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing). The submission server will be available a month before the submission deadline.

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 STOC.) 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 Submissions: 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 July 2022, will not be considered for acceptance at STOC 2022. The only exception to this policy are prior or simultaneous publications appearing in the Science and Nature journals. SIGACT policy does not allow simultaneous submissions of the same (or essentially the same) material to another conference with published proceedings. The program committee may consult with program chairs of other (past or future) conferences to find out about closely related submissions.
Dates and other relevant information:

Paper submission deadline: Thursday, November 4, 2021 (4:59pm EDT).

Notification deadline: by email on or before February 6, 2022.

Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: A camera-ready copy of each accepted paper is required by April 10, 2022. The page limit is 14 pages including all references and appendices. The format of your paper must strictly adhere to the ACM Format, and specifically the sigconf option. (LaTeX users, please use:\documentclass[sigconf,screen]{acmart}). Additional instructions will be sent directly to the authors of accepted papers.

STOC talks: Monday morning June 20 to Friday afternoon June 24, 2022.
Theory Fest activities: Monday morning June 20 to Friday afternoon June 24, 2022.

Publication date: AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)

Presentation of Accepted Papers: One author of each accepted paper will be expected to register and present the work in the form of a talk at the conference. In addition, one or more authors may be expected to present the work in a poster session.

Best Paper Award: The program committee may designate up to three papers accepted to the conference as STOC Best Papers. PC member submissions are not eligible for the Best Paper award. All other submissions are automatically eligible. Rules for the award can be found at https://www.sigact.org/prizes/best_paper.html.

Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award: A prize of $500 will be given to the author(s) of the best student authored paper (or split between more than one paper if there is a tie). A paper is eligible if all of its authors are full-time students at the time of submission. To inform the program committee about a paper's eligibility, check the appropriate box in the web form on the submission server. The list of past winners can be found at https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html.

Access to Proceedings: The committee intends to provide registered attendees with internet access to the Proceedings on a password-protected site that will be available from about two weeks before the conference until the end of the conference. Authors can opt out of this online distribution by contacting the program committee chair by March 15, 2022.

Student Travel Awards: SIGACT provides travel awards to students without available support, and researchers from developing countries. More information on the award process will be posted later on.
Program Committee:

Sepehr Assadi (Rutgers University)
Shalev Ben-David (University of Waterloo)
Karl Bringmann (Saarland University)
Shiri Chechik (Tel Aviv University)
Andrew Childs (University of Maryland)
Kai-Min Chung (Academia Sinica)
Kenneth L. Clarkson (IBM Research)
Alina Ene (Boston University)
Michal Feldman (Tel Aviv University)
Ankit Garg (Microsoft Research India)
Mika Göös (EPFL)
Anupam Gupta (Carnegie Mellon University)(chair)
Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley)
Sam Hopkins (University of California Berkeley and MIT)
Michael Kapralov (EPFL)
Dakshita Khurana (University of Illinois)
Gillat Kol (Princeton University)
Mrinal Kumar (IIT Bombay)
Amit Kumar (IIT Delhi)
Rasmus Kyng (ETH Zurich)
Kasper Green Larsen (Aarhus University)
Euiwoong Lee (University of Michigan)
Troy Lee (University of Technology, Sydney)


François Le Gall (Nagoya University)
Renato Paes Leme (Google Research)
Jerry Li (Microsoft Research Redmond)
Shi Li (The University at Buffalo)
Huijia (Rachel) Lin (University of Washington)
Konstantin Makarychev (Northwestern University)
Pasin Manurangsi (Google Research)
Shay Moran (Technion and Google Research)
Dana Moshkovitz (University of Texas at Austin)
Cameron Musco (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Danupon Nanongkai (University of Copenhagen)
Michał Pilipczuk (University of Warsaw)
Eva Rotenberg (DTU, Denmark)
Thomas Rothvoss (University of Washington)
Sushant Sachdeva (University of Toronto)
Rocco Servedio (Columbia University)
Luca Trevisan (Bocconi University)
Greg Valiant (Stanford University)
Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech)
Matt Weinberg (Princeton University)
Ryan Williams (MIT)
Ronald de Wolf (CWI and University of Amsterdam)

General Chair: Tal Rabin (University of Pennsylvania)
Local Arrangements Chair: Stefano Leonardi (Sapienza University of Rome)