Special Section on the Fifty-Eighth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2017)

Abstract

This special section comprises nine fully refereed papers whose extended abstracts were presented at the 58th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2017) in Berkeley, California, on October 15--17, 2017. The preliminary conference versions of these papers were published by in the FOCS 2017 proceedings. The regular conference program consisted of 90 papers chosen from among 323 submissions. They were selected by a program committee consisting of Aditya Bhaskara, Andrej Bogdanov, Vladimir Braverman, Shiri Chechik, Gil Cohen, Anindya De, Ankit Garg, Josh Grochow, Sean Hallgren, Valentine Kabanets, Gillat Kol, Ravi Kumar, Chris Peikert, Sofya Raskhodnikova, Rahul Santhanam, Yaron Singer, Chaitanya Swamy, Amnon Ta-Shma, Chris Umans (chair), Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Emanuele Viola, Omri Weinstein, and Amir Yehudayoff. The papers invited to this special section were also chosen with the input of the program committee. The nine papers in this section span a broad range of topics, including cryptography, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, complexity theory, communication complexity, graph sparsification, and error-correcting codes. 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 SICOMP Editors-in-Chief Leonard Schulman and Robert Krauthgamer and SIAM Senior Publications Coordinator Heather Blythe for their help in preparing this special section.