Proceedings of the 5th conference on Innovations in theoretical computer science

Abstract

The papers in this volume were presented at the 5th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2014) conference, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). The conference was held in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, January 11--14, 2014. ITCS (previously known as ICS) seeks to promote research that carries a strong conceptual message, for instance, introducing a new concept or model, opening a new line of inquiry within traditional or cross-interdisciplinary areas, or introducing new techniques or new applications of known techniques). The call for papers welcomed all submissions, whether aligned with current theory of computation research directions or deviating from them. Altogether 116 submissions were received worldwide. Of these the program committee selected 48 papers. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics in theoretical computer science, including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, learning, data privacy, quantum, physical and biological computing and relations between computing and social sciences. In addition to the selected papers the committee invited Professor Peter Winkler of Dartmouth to give an evening talk and we are grateful for his acceptance. Another evening was devoted to "Graduating Bits" - short talks by recent graduates. The program committee consisted of 24 members (plus the chair): Deeparnab Chakrabarty (Microsoft Research India), Timothy Chan (University of Waterloo), Costis Daskalakis (MIT), Yuval Emek (ETH and Technion), Kousha Etessami (University of Edinburgh), Yuval Filmus (University of Toronto and Simons Institute, Berkeley), Arpita Ghosh (Cornell University), Monika Henzinger (University of Vienna), Sandy Irani (University of California Irvine), Michael nKearns (University of Pennsylvania), Lap Chi Lau (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Nati Linial (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Kobbi Nissim (Ben-Gurion University), Rasmus Pagh (IT University of Copenhagen), Shubhangi Saraf (Rutgers University), Ola Svensson (EPFL), Vinod Vaikuntanathan (University of Toronto and MIT), Jan Vondrak (IBM Almaden Research Center), Manfred Warmuth (University of California, Santa Cruz), Daniel Wichs (Northeastern University), Udi Wieder (Microsoft Research SVC), Ryan Williams (Stanford University), Ronald de Wolf (CWI and University of Amsterdam), David Xiao (CNRS and Universite Paris 7). I wish to express my admiration for their hard work of reading, evaluating and debating the merits of the submissions. The many individuals who assisted the reviewing process as subreviewers and extended the expertise of the committee deserve acknowledgments as well.