Are you an undergrad looking to do TCS research in graduate school? Getting into a Ph.D. program without prior research experience can be challenging. Fortunately, you can gain research experience through certain Master’s programs. See https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~smattw/masters/masters.html for more information and a crowdsourced list of such opportunities. The list is maintained by Aviad Rubinstein and Matt Weinberg.
For all authors preparing submissions for this year’s STOC, the conference is running a new experimental program to provide automated pre-submission feedback.
We are offering authors the opportunity to opt-in and receive a review of their paper generated by an advanced LLM-based tool (built on Google’s Gemini model) that is optimized for checking mathematical rigor. The goal is to provide constructive suggestions and help find technical mistakes before the final submission deadline.
Here are the key details:
What it is: An optional, opt-in program to get an automated review of your STOC submission.
Deadline: To participate, you must opt-in and submit your full paper on HotCRP by November 1, 5pm EST.
Confidentiality (from PC): The reviews generated WILL NOT be passed on to the PC. They are only visible to the authors and the program organizers.
Data Privacy (Our Commitment): We commit to “No Logging.” Your paper will not be logged, stored, or used for training.
Please do not publicly share these reviews without contacting the organizing team first.
Please note that the tool is optimized to check a paper’s self-contained mathematical rigor. Because it does not possess external, area-specific knowledge (such as folklore results), it may flag sections that rely on unstated assumptions. We hope you find this feedback useful for improving your paper’s overall clarity and completeness.
This experiment is conducted by PC members David Woodruff (CMU) and Rajesh Jayaram (Google), as well as Vincent Cohen-Addad (Google) and Jon Schneider (Google).
Your participation and feedback will help us assess the value of such tools for future theory conferences.
To opt-in, please check the box on the HotCRP submission form for your paper. Full details on the program are available at the link below.
The FOCS 2025 ToT Award committee is now accepting nominations. The target years for the Test of Time Awards in 2025 are for papers presented at the FOCS conferences in 1995, 2005, and 2015. Following guidance from the FOCS Steering Committee, while focusing on the target years, the award committee will consider nominations for exceptional papers in other years. (Please see https://tc.computer.org/tcmf/focs-test-time-award/ for more details, including award winners of previous years.)
Nomination Procedure
Nominations should be sent by September 15, 2025 to shafi.goldwasser@gmail.com with a subject line of “FOCS TOT nomination“. Nominations should contain an explanation of the technical achievements and the impact of the nominated paper(s), including references to follow-on work. Self-nominations are discouraged.
Dear Theory Friends, I am excited to announce that I just completed writing a new textbook, titled Introduction to Probability for Computing, published by Cambridge University Press, 2024. This book is based on my “Probability and Computing” class at CMU. It should be useful for teaching undergraduates and masters students. This link includes a pdf for every chapter.
The first is a guide for PC chairing written by Julia Chuzhoy and Anupam Gupta based on their experience with STOC, and passed along to other chairs.
The second is a guide for general chairs / local organizers, written mostly by David Kempe but also thanks to Michael Hoffmann, Valerie King, and Yusu Wang.
We hope such documents will give more insight and transparency into what goes on behind the scenes in our conferences each year.
We do realize that there are technical details in these documents, some of which are obsolete and some of which may not be interesting to the general public, but we think such documents should be more well-known and we hope they will stimulate discussion in our community and give us ideas on how we can improve.
You may remember that a task force was convened by CATCS to investigate approaches to modifying aspects of the TCS community, especially our publishing culture, and to enhance connections with other areas of CS and be as welcoming as possible to a broad range of contributions within theory. A survey was given to members of our community, 338 responses were received, and the results were summarized at STOC, 2023. Please see the attached slides from Jelani Nelson’s presentation at STOC, as well as the attached detailed report. Let us know if you have any feedback, thanks!
Are you or your institution looking to hire a theoretician? Check out these job market profiles of TCS candidates. Feel free to share widely within your network. This information can also be found under the “TCSJob Market” tab in the menu above.
Candidates on the TCS job market: fill out this form to get your profile added to the list. We will review responses and add them to the list every 2-3 weeks.
Theory Matters