Conference announcement: Celebrating 100 Years: Avi 70 + CSDM 30

Celebrating 100 Years: Avi 70 + CSDM 30
Dates: June 14-18, 2027

The Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics is pleased to announce a conference celebrating Avi Wigderson’s 70th birthday and retirement, together with 30 years of the Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics program (CSDM) at IAS. The conference will honor both Avi’s extraordinary scientific legacy and his transformative role in shaping the intellectual community around theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics at IAS.

Avi Wigderson has made foundational contributions across an exceptional range of areas in theoretical computer science and mathematics. His work has had a profound impact on complexity theory broadly, and especially on cryptography, circuit and proof complexity, communication complexity, pseudorandomness, and expander graphs; in recent years, he has also opened deep and unexpected connections to invariant theory. These contributions have shaped major research directions and influenced generations of mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists.

Posted on behalf of the organizers, Irit Dinur and Amir Shpilka. Additional information is available at https://www.ias.edu/math/events/celebrating-100-years-avi-70-csdm-30.

Trevisan Award for Expository Work

Posted on behalf of Salil Vadhan, the award committee chair:

The Trevisan Award for Expository Work is a new SIGACT award created in memory of Luca Trevisan (1971-2024), with a nomination deadline of April 10, 2026.  

The award is intended to promote and recognize high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the Theory of Computation. The exposition can have various target audiences, e.g. people in this field, people in adjacent or remote academic fields, as well as the general public. The form of exposition can vary, and can include books, surveys, lectures, course materials, video, audio (e.g. podcasts), blogs and other media products. The award may be given to a single piece of work or a series produced over time. The award may be given to an individual, or a small group who together produced this expository work.

The awardee will receive USD 2000 (to be divided among the awardees if multiple), as well as travel support if needed to attend STOC, where the award will be presented. STOC 2026 is June 22-26 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The endowment for this prize was initiated by a gift from Avi Wigderson, drawing on his Turing Award, and has been subsequently augmented by other individuals.

For more details see https://sigact.org/prizes/trevisan.html.

STOC 2026 Experimental Program Announcement

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

FOCS Test of Time Award: Call for Nominations

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 shafi.goldwasser@gmail.com 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.