Are you an undergrad looking to do TCS research in graduate school? Getting into a Ph.D. program without prior research experience can be challenging. Fortunately, you can gain research experience through certain Master’s programs. See https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~smattw/masters/masters.html for more information and a crowdsourced list of such opportunities. The list is maintained by Aviad Rubinstein and Matt Weinberg.
STOC 2026 Experimental Program Announcement
October 24, 2025 by
For all authors preparing submissions for this year’s STOC, the conference is running a new experimental program to provide automated pre-submission feedback.
We are offering authors the opportunity to opt-in and receive a review of their paper generated by an advanced LLM-based tool (built on Google’s Gemini model) that is optimized for checking mathematical rigor. The goal is to provide constructive suggestions and help find technical mistakes before the final submission deadline.
Here are the key details:
What it is: An optional, opt-in program to get an automated review of your STOC submission.
Deadline: To participate, you must opt-in and submit your full paper on HotCRP by November 1, 5pm EST.
Confidentiality (from PC): The reviews generated WILL NOT be passed on to the PC. They are only visible to the authors and the program organizers.
Data Privacy (Our Commitment): We commit to “No Logging.” Your paper will not be logged, stored, or used for training.
Please do not publicly share these reviews without contacting the organizing team first.
Please note that the tool is optimized to check a paper’s self-contained mathematical rigor. Because it does not possess external, area-specific knowledge (such as folklore results), it may flag sections that rely on unstated assumptions. We hope you find this feedback useful for improving your paper’s overall clarity and completeness.
This experiment is conducted by PC members David Woodruff (CMU) and Rajesh Jayaram (Google), as well as Vincent Cohen-Addad (Google) and Jon Schneider (Google).
Your participation and feedback will help us assess the value of such tools for future theory conferences.
To opt-in, please check the box on the HotCRP submission form for your paper. Full details on the program are available at the link below.
Please see the STOC 2026 Call for Papers here:
https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/stoc2026-cfp.html
and specific details on the experiment here:
https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/stoc2026-LLM_feedback.html
We are offering authors the opportunity to opt-in and receive a review of their paper generated by an advanced LLM-based tool (built on Google’s Gemini model) that is optimized for checking mathematical rigor. The goal is to provide constructive suggestions and help find technical mistakes before the final submission deadline.
Here are the key details:
What it is: An optional, opt-in program to get an automated review of your STOC submission.
Deadline: To participate, you must opt-in and submit your full paper on HotCRP by November 1, 5pm EST.
Confidentiality (from PC): The reviews generated WILL NOT be passed on to the PC. They are only visible to the authors and the program organizers.
Data Privacy (Our Commitment): We commit to “No Logging.” Your paper will not be logged, stored, or used for training.
Please do not publicly share these reviews without contacting the organizing team first.
Please note that the tool is optimized to check a paper’s self-contained mathematical rigor. Because it does not possess external, area-specific knowledge (such as folklore results), it may flag sections that rely on unstated assumptions. We hope you find this feedback useful for improving your paper’s overall clarity and completeness.
This experiment is conducted by PC members David Woodruff (CMU) and Rajesh Jayaram (Google), as well as Vincent Cohen-Addad (Google) and Jon Schneider (Google).
Your participation and feedback will help us assess the value of such tools for future theory conferences.
To opt-in, please check the box on the HotCRP submission form for your paper. Full details on the program are available at the link below.
Please see the STOC 2026 Call for Papers here:
https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/stoc2026-cfp.html
and specific details on the experiment here:
https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/stoc2026-LLM_feedback.html
FOCS Test of Time Award: Call for Nominations
September 7, 2025 by
The FOCS 2025 ToT Award committee is now accepting nominations. The target years for the Test of Time Awards in 2025 are for papers presented at the FOCS conferences in 1995, 2005, and 2015. Following guidance from the FOCS Steering Committee, while focusing on the target years, the award committee will consider nominations for exceptional papers in other years. (Please see https://tc.computer.org/tcmf/focs-test-time-award/ for more details, including award winners of previous years.)
Nomination Procedure
Nominations should be sent by September 15, 2025 to [email protected] with a subject line of “FOCS TOT nomination“. Nominations should contain an explanation of the technical achievements and the impact of the nominated paper(s), including references to follow-on work. Self-nominations are discouraged.
For more details visit https://tc.computer.org/tcmf/2025/08/26/focs-test-of-time-award-call-for-nominations-2025/.
Other opportunities
The deadlines for FOCS’25 travel support and childcare are also coming up soon. See the FOCS website for more details.
FOCS 2024 Test of Time Awards Nominations
June 9, 2024 by
From Jin-Yi Cai (chair of the committee):
The FOCS 2024 Test of Time Awards committee is soliciting nominations. Nominations are due July 31, 2024. More details are available at https://tc.computer.org/tcmf/2024/05/28/focs-test-of-time-award-call-for-nominations-2024/.
Knuth Prize call for nominations
March 3, 2024 by
Please consider nominating someone for the Knuth prize! The deadline is March 31 and the call is here:
New book on Probability
October 18, 2023 by
A new book announcement from Mor Harchol-Balter:
Dear Theory Friends, I am excited to announce that I just completed writing a new textbook, titled Introduction to Probability for Computing, published by Cambridge University Press, 2024. This book is based on my “Probability and Computing” class at CMU. It should be useful for teaching undergraduates and masters students. This link includes a pdf for every chapter.
The book is written in the usual student-friendly Question/Answer format that many of you have come to know from my earlier textbook: Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action. Thanks for taking a look!
Mor
Wikipedia edit-a-thon at FOCS
October 15, 2023 by
FOCS’23 is hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Monday, Nov 6, 2023.
Let’s get together and create or edit Wikipedia pages for CS Theory entries. Both new and experienced Wiki editors are welcome to participate!
Read more and sign up at https://sites.google.com/view/tcs-edit-a-thon.
– Divyarthi Mohan, Aviad Rubinstein, Ewin Tang, and Shuchi Chawla (organizers)
PC chair and general chair guidelines for TCS conferences
August 22, 2023 by
We have collected several documents here.
The first is a guide for PC chairing written by Julia Chuzhoy and Anupam Gupta based on their experience with STOC, and passed along to other chairs.
The second is a guide for general chairs / local organizers, written mostly by David Kempe but also thanks to Michael Hoffmann, Valerie King, and Yusu Wang.
We hope such documents will give more insight and transparency into what goes on behind the scenes in our conferences each year.
We do realize that there are technical details in these documents, some of which are obsolete and some of which may not be interesting to the general public, but we think such documents should be more well-known and we hope they will stimulate discussion in our community and give us ideas on how we can improve.
Please let us know if you have any comments!
TCS Insularity Survey Results
August 16, 2023 by
You may remember that a task force was convened by CATCS to investigate approaches to modifying aspects of the TCS community, especially our publishing culture, and to enhance connections with other areas of CS and be as welcoming as possible to a broad range of contributions within theory. A survey was given to members of our community, 338 responses were received, and the results were summarized at STOC, 2023. Please see the attached slides from Jelani Nelson’s presentation at STOC, as well as the attached detailed report. Let us know if you have any feedback, thanks!
TCS Job Market profiles
January 31, 2023 by
Are you or your institution looking to hire a theoretician? Check out these job market profiles of TCS candidates. Feel free to share widely within your network. This information can also be found under the “TCS Job Market” tab in the menu above.
Candidates on the TCS job market: fill out this form to get your profile added to the list. We will review responses and add them to the list every 2-3 weeks.
Theory Matters 
