This special section comprises ten fully refereed papers whose extended abstracts were presented at the 55th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2014) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 19--21, 2014. The unrefereed conference versions of these papers were published by IEEE in the FOCS 2014 proceedings. The regular conference program consisted of 68 papers chosen from among 273 submissions. These were selected by a program committee consisting of Scott Aaronson, Boaz Barak, Nikhil Bansal, Timothy Chan, Moses Charikar, Shuchi Chawla, Julia Chuzhoy, Andrew Drucker, Valerie King, Robert Kleinberg, Eyal Kushilevitz, James R. Lee, Aleksander Madry, Raghu Meka, Ankur Moitra, Aaron Roth, Alexander Russell, David Steurer, Madhu Sudan, Kunal Talwar, Brent Waters, Ryan Williams, and David Woodruff. The program committee was chaired by Boaz Barak. The papers invited to this special section were also selected with the input of the program committee. The ten papers in this section span a...