Special Section on the Fiftieth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2009)

Abstract

This section of SIAM Journal on Computing contains extended versions of selected papers from the 50th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing. The conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia, October 24--27, 2009, at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel Downtown. The program committee consisted of Sanjeev Arora, Maria Florina Balcan, Boaz Barak, Mark Braverman, Amit Chakrabarti, Ken Clarkson, Alon Efrat, Martin Furer, Anna Gilbert, Phil Klein, Ming Li, Mihai Patrascu, Dana Ron, Tim Roughgarden, Daniel Spielman, Mario Szegedy, Kunal Talwar, Eli Upfal, Umesh Vazirani, Vijay Vazirani, and Berthold Vocking. They accepted 75 papers from 249 submissions. We briefly describe the papers that appear here. In “On the Power of Randomization in Algorithmic Mechanism Design,” Shahar Dobzinski and Shaddin Dughmi analyze multi-unit auctions to show that truthfulness in expectation is more powerful than universal truthfu...