Special Section On The Thirty-Ninth Annual ACM Symposium On Theory Of Computing (STOC 2007)

Abstract

This issue contains the polished, extended, and fully refereed versions of a selection of papers that were presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2007), which was held June 11-13, 2007, in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC 2007). Unrefereed preliminary versions of these papers were published by ACM in the proceedings of the meeting, along with the other papers presented at the symposium. The conference program included 77 papers, selected from among a record 312 submissions by a program committee chaired by Uriel Feige and consisting of Eric Allender, Andris Ambainis, Chandra Chekuri, Artur Czumaj, Yevgeniy Dodis, Michel Goemans, Martin Grohe, Russell Impagliazzo, Valerie King, Robert Kleinberg, Vladlen Koltun, Robi Krauthgamer, Jiri Matousek, Milena Mihail, Ryan O'Donnell, Vijaya Ramachandran, Leonard Schulman, Maxim Sviridenko, Mikkel Thorup, Salil Vadhan, and Santosh Vempala. The authors of 14 of these 77 papers were invited to submit revised versions for this special section; nine accepted the invitation, although one paper was not completed in time to appear in this volume. One paper that appears in this special issue (by Haitner et al.) is the result of merging a STOC 2007 paper with a FOCS 2006 paper that had been invited for the special issue of SIAM Journal on Computing devoted to FOCS 2006; the authors felt that a single, streamlined paper would be more beneficial to the community, and the editors concurred. The paper by Martin Furer appearing in this issue is one of two papers that shared the award for best paper in STOC 2007. All of these papers were refereed in accordance with the stringent standards of SIAM Journal on Computing. We thank the anonymous referees and the authors for their efforts, resulting in substantial improvements in the end product. We also thank the rest of the program committee members for their help in the selection process. The three of us listed below are honored to have had the opportunity to serve as guest editors in preparing this special issue.