The 8th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference will be held in Berkeley, during January 9-11 2017, and will be sponsored by the Simons Institute.

ITCS seeks to promote research that carries a strong conceptual message (e.g., introducing a new concept or model, opening a new line of inquiry within traditional or interdisciplinary areas, introducing new mathematical techniques and methodologies, or new applications of known techniques). ITCS welcomes all submissions, whether aligned with current theory of computation research directions or deviating from them.

See the recent blog post about ITCS 2016 and 2017.

Important dates


Submission deadline:

Notification to authors:

Conference dates:

   

Thu September 15, 2016

Mon Oct 31, 2016

Mon-Wed Jan 9-11, 2017

Organizers


Alessandro Chiesa, Christos Papadimitriou, Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley)

Program committee


Scott Aaronson (UT Austin)
Elette Boyle (IDC Herzliya)
Mark Braverman (Princeton University)
Alessandro Chiesa (UC Berkeley)
Artur Czumaj (University of Warwick)
Costis Daskalakis (MIT)
Shafi Goldwasser (MIT)
Anna Karlin (University of Washington)
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University)
Swastik Kopparty (Rutgers University)
Muthu Muthukrishnan (Rutgers University)
Noam Nisan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley) - PC chair
Georgios Piliouras (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Toniann Pitassi (University of Toronto)
Tal Rabin (IBM T.J.Watson Research Center)
Alexander Razborov (University of Chicago)
Tim Roughgarden (Stanford University)
Aviad Rubinstein (UC Berkeley)
Nikhil Srivastava (UC Berkeley)
Chris Umans (CalTech)
Paul Valiant (Brown University)
Virginia Vassilevska-Williams (Stanford University)
Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley)
Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech)
Mary Wootters (Stanford University)
Nir Yosef (UC Berkeley)
Henry Yuen (UC Berkeley)
Lisa Zhang (Bell Labs)

Submission format


Authors may either submit a link to their paper on an online archive (ECCC, arXiv, or Crypto ePrint), or they can upload a pdf of the paper on the submission server (in this case the submission will be treated as confidential).

Authors should strive to make their paper accessible not only to experts in their subarea, but also to the theory community at large. It is typically wise for the paper to contain, within its first few pages, a concise and clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of its importance, prior work, and an outline (similar to a brief oral presentation) of key technical ideas and methods used to achieve the main claims. The paper should also allow reviewers to easily expand their understanding of any specific detail they deem important for evaluating the submission. While there is no official limit on the length of a submission, PC members may not read beyond the first ten pages of the submission.

In keeping with the Innovations theme of the conference, authors are also invited to include with their submission a statement (up to 1,000 words) complementing the paper's introduction so as to inform the committee members (in a more detailed and free-style way than is usually done in an introduction) about the paper's significance, innovations, key technical ideas, and place within (or outside…) our field's scope and literature (if you feel this is self-evident, your statement can simply say that). Think of it as an opportunity to write a sympathetic referee report about, or a review of, your paper: an opportunity to explain the most innovative and novel aspect of your results (rather than an exercise in salesmanship!). Note that statements will be treated as confidential (but may be forwarded to sub-referees). Authors may eventually be encouraged to incorporate particularly insightful parts of their statement into the introduction of their final paper.

To better understand what is intended, here are three examples of statements:

  • 2-Source Extractors Under Computational Assumptions and Cryptography with Defective Randomness; Yael Tauman Kalai, Xin Li, Anup Rao (FOCS '09). [paper] [statement]
  • A Polynomial-time Algorithm for the Ground State of 1D Gapped local Hamiltonians; Zeph Landau, Umesh Vazirani, Thomas Vidick (ITCS '14). [paper] [statement]
  • A Physically Universal Cellular Automaton; Luke Schaeffer (ITCS '15). [paper] [statement]

Prior, simultaneous, and subsequent submissions


Results published/presented/submitted at another archival conference will not be considered for ITCS. Simultaneous submission to ITCS and to a journal is allowed. Papers accepted to ITCS should not be submitted to any other archival conferences.

Accepted papers


Papers accepted to the conference must be presented at the conference by one or more of the authors. The exact schedule of presentations, including the time allotted for each presentation (which may vary for different presentations), will be decided based on the pool of accepted papers.

Invited papers


The program committee may invite individuals to present their specific significant recent work at the conference. Submitted papers may be elevated to “invited” status at the discretion of the committee.

Poster session


A poster session may be arranged by the program committee.

Graduating bits


Participants within a couple of years (either way) of PhD graduation will be given 5 minutes to present their results, research, plans, personality, and so on. This is one of the important traditions of ITCS, and a sublime moment every year!

Proceedings


Accepted and invited papers will appear in electronic proceedings.

Paper Submission


You may submit online at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=itcs2017 . There are two ways to submit: either (1) submit your statement and a link to the paper on an online archive; or (2) submit your statement and the paper, as one PDF file.