Special Section on the Fifty-Second IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2011)

Abstract

This special section comprises 11 fully refereed papers whose extended abstracts were presented at the 52nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2011) in Palm Springs, California, October 23--25, 2011. The unrefereed conference versions of these papers were published by IEEE in the FOCS 2011 proceedings. The regular conference program consisted of 85 papers chosen from among 292 submissions. These were selected by a program committee consisting of Nir Ailon, Eli Ben-Sasson, Serge Fehr, Juan A. Garay, Russell Impagliazzo, Sandy Irani, Kamal Jain, Stefano Leonardi, Richard Lipton, Claire Mathieu, Dieter van Melkebeek, Ashwin Nayak, Rafail Ostrovsky (chair), Boaz Patt-Shamir, Tim Roughgarden, Rocco Servedio, Adam Smith, Kunal Talwar, Chris Umans, Chee Keng Yap, and Lisa Zhang. The papers invited to this special section were also selected with the input of the program committee. The 11 papers in this section span a broad range of topics, including cryptography, approximation algorithms, SAT solving algorithms, combinatorics, mechanism design, and derandomization. Each paper underwent an extensive refereeing process; we thank the authors and the anonymous referees for their efforts. In addition, we would like to thank Madhu Sudan, who was SICOMP’s editor-in-chief as this project began; Leonard Schulman, the current editor-in-chief; and SIAM Senior Publications Coordinator Heather Blythe for their help in preparing this special section.