Special Section on Foundations of Computer Science

Abstract

This section comprises fully refereed versions of nine papers that were presented at the Forty-Seventh Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2006), held in Berkeley, California, October 22–24, 2006. The FOCS 2006 Program Committee consisted of Sanjeev Arora (chair), Rajeev Alur, Matthew Andrews, Avrim Blum, Moses Charikar, Shuchi Chawla, Jeff Erickson, Lisa Fleischer, Lance Fortnow, Ravi Kannan, Sampath Kannan, Haim Kaplan, Anna Karlin, Joe Kilian, Guy Kindler, Ashwin Nayak, Christos Papadimitriou, Harald Räcke, Rajmohan Rajaraman, Dana Randall, Michael Saks, Daniel Spielman, and Peter Winkler. The committee selected 71 of 240 papers to be presented at the symposium, and unrefereed preliminary versions of these papers appeared in the conference proceedings, which were published by IEEE. The nine papers selected for this section cover a number of topics and problems in theoretical computer science, including computational geometry, smoothed complexity, learning, list decoding, set partitioning and matching. Each paper was extensively reviewed, and most underwent multiple revisions. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this special section, including the anonymous referees; the SIAM Journal on Computing Editor-in-Chief, Eva Tardos; and SIAM staff members Melissa Buono, Mitch Chernoff, and Cherie Trebisky.