STOC

The results in this volume were presented at the 45th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2013), which was held in Palo Alto, CA, June 2-4, 2013, and sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).

At the suggestion of SIGACT Past Chair Lance Fortnow, we experimented with a two-tiered program committee for the first time in STOC's 45-year history. Specifically, the program was constructed by a nine-person Executive Committee (EC) and a 62-person Program Committee (PC). Members of the PC were allowed to submit, but members of the EC were not. It was an interesting and highly controversial experiment that I blogged about at Michael Mitzenmacher's invitation (http://mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com/2013/02/discussing-stoc-2013-pc-with-joan.html). I will post a longer report on the experiment on my web page in June 2013.

We received 373 submissions, 13 of which were withdrawn before accept/reject decisions were made. Of the remaining 360 submissions, 100 were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 27.8%; after accept/reject decisions were announced, one of the accepted submissions was withdrawn. One pair of accepted submissions was presented in a joint talk, for a total of 98 talks and 99 proceedings contributions. Submissions were not formally and officially refereed, and many of the proceedings contributions are preliminary reports on ongoing research; it is expected that most of the results in the proceedings will ultimately be published in final form in refereed journals.

From the many excellent candidates, we selected "Low Rank Approximation and Regression in Input Sparsity Time," by Kenneth L. Clarkson and David P. Woodruff, and "Approximation Resistance from Pairwise Independent Subgroups," by Siu On Chan, as co-winners of the Best- Paper Award and "Maintaining Shortest Paths Under Deletions in Weighted Directed Graphs," by Aaron Bernstein, and "Approximation Resistance from Pairwise Independent Subgroups," by Siu on Chan, as co-winners of the Danny Lewin Best-Student-Paper Award.

In addition to the basic conference program, STOC 2013 included the Knuth-Prize lecture by Gary Miller on June 3 and three workshops on June 1: "New (Theoretical) Challenges in Machine Learning," "Information Complexity and Applications," and "Online Matching and Ad Serving: Theory and Practice." The June 1 program also included an invited talk by Prabhakar Raghavan and a panel session on grant-proposal writing. A poster session was held in the evening of June 2.