FOCS 2026 will be held in New York City Nov 8 - 11! CFP is up (link below). Submit your best work in theoretical computer science by April 1, 5pm ET.

New year, new team, new FOCS! Follow this account for updates and announcements about #FOCS2026!

The Call for Papers and submission server for #FOCS2026 are up!

⏰ Deadline: April 1, 5:00 PM EDT (21:00 UTC)

sanjeevkhanna.org/FOCS2026_CFP...

And... that's a wrap for #FOCS2025! Thanks to authors, attendees, program committee members, and sponsors who all made it happen!

(Also, the occasional bin chicken)

Rachel Yun Zhang

Michael Jaber

Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi

Best #FOCS2025 Paper talks: Rachel Yun Zhang (left), Michael Jaber (middle), and Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi (right)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtey...

Rahul at the lectern

Miryam and Er-Chang at the lectern

Best #FOCS2025 Student Paper (Machtey award) talks: Rahul Ilango (left) and Miryam Mi-Ying Huang and Er-Cheng Tang

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtey...

View of the harbour from the banquet venue

View of the room, with the opera house in the background and Joachim Gudmundsson in the middle

Ready for the conference banquet!

The info and slides of the 18 🎓 "Graduating Bits" participants are now available on the website!

Look at them, hire them!
focs.computer.org/2025/graduat...

The info and slides of the 18 🎓 "Graduating Bits" participants are now available on the website!

Look at them, hire them!
focs.computer.org/2025/graduat...

Audience in the room, in front of the screen where Sebastien's slides are projected, with Rotem Oshman on the stage, introducing him

Second plenary session of the conference: Sebastien Bubeck (OpenAI) on "Recent Advances in LLMs for Mathematics" #FOCS2025

📢 #FOCS2026 will be held in NewYork City, USA!

Nov 8–11, 2026 at NYU (colocated with TCC)
General Chair: Marshall Ball
PC Chair: Sanjeev Khanna (Co-Chair: Sepehr Assadi)

Winners of the #FOCS2025 Cartoon Caption Contest:

- "This guy is about to blow up the polynomial hierarchy." [ Rachel Zhang ]
- "Not exactly what I meant by 'increase FOCS acceptance rate.'" [ @mahdi.ch ]

Some numbers - 301 registrations (2022: 271, 2023: 279, 2024: 340), among which 144 students (44%) - USD 110k of sponsorship (AUD 160k) - 66 students/postdocs with travel support (63 accepted): waiver, accommodation, partial travel - 2 childcare support (so far) - 301 Tim Tams

And from my " #FOCS2025 General Chair report" (note: the actual number is 302, there was an on-site registration later that day)

Breaking a Long-Standing Barrier: 2𝜖 Approximation for Steiner Forest
Ali Ahmadi, Iman Gholami, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Peyman Jabbarzade, Mohammad Mahdavi

Quasipolynomial bounds for the corners theorem
Michael Jaber, Yang P. Liu, Shachar Lovett, Anthony Ostuni, Mehtaab Sawhney

🏆 #FOCS2025 Best Paper Awards (3 papers!)

Explicit Lossless Vertex Expanders
Jun-Ting Hsieh, Alexander Lubotzky, Sidhanth Mohanty, Assaf Reiner, Rachel Yun Zhang

🏆 #FOCS2025 Best Student Paper Awards 🎓

Godel in Cryptography: Effectively Zero Knowledge Proofs for NP with No Interaction, No Setup, and Perfect Soundness
Rahul Ilango

Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs
Mi-Ying Huang, Er-Cheng Tang

A Faster Cutting Plane Method and its Implications for Combinatorial and Convex Optimization
Yin Tat Lee, Aaron Sidford, Sam Chiu-Wai Wong
56th FOCS, 2015

Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Functional Encryption
Nir Bitansky, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
56th FOCS, 2015

Deterministic Communication vs. Partition Number
Mika Göös, Toniann Pitassi, Thomas Watson
56th FOCS, 2015

Agnostically Learning Half Spaces,
Adam T. Kalai, Adam R. Klivans, Yishay Mansour Rocco A. Servedio
46th FOCS, 2005

AdWord and Generalized Online Matching
Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi, Umesh Vazirani, Vijay Vazirani
46th FOCS, 2005

The Unique Games Conjecture, Integrality Gap for Cut Problems and Embeddability of Negative Type
Subhash A.Khot, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi
46th FOCS, 2005

🏆 FOCS 2025 Test of Time awards:

Private Information Retrieval
Benny Chor, Eyal Kushilevitz, Oded Goldreich, Madhu Sudan
36th FOCS, 1995

Gambling in a rigged casino: The adversarial multi-armed bandit
Paul Auer, Nicoló Cesa-Bianchi Yoav Freund, Robert Schapire
36th FOCS, 1995

📢 #FOCS2028 will be held in Potsdam, Germany!
Early October 2028
General Chair: Tobias Friedrich

FOCS 2027? TBD: Make a bid!

📢 #FOCS2026 will be held in NewYork City, USA!

Nov 8–11, 2026 at NYU (colocated with TCC)
General Chair: Marshall Ball
PC Chair: Sanjeev Khanna (Co-Chair: Sepehr Assadi)

Yes.

Shafi at the lectern, in front of her title slide

Crowded room for the plenary

First plenary session of the conference: Shafi Goldwasser (MIT and Berkeley) on "A Crypto/Complexity Theorist Perspective on Trusting AI" #FOCS2025

A coffee cart with the FOCS logo

A coffee cup with the writing "magic"

Kicking off the first day of the main conference with proper caffeination! #FOCS2025

Robin Bowers, first of the presenters, giving a 2-mn presentation on their research in front of the audience

Wonderfully crowded "Graduating Bits" session at #FOCS2025!

More on the social ad networking activities at #FOCS2025: focs.computer.org/2025/activit...

A person painting a graffiti which says P=NP

A fox among kangaroos

The conference is starting in a few hours! We'll post here information about #FOCS2025 as it goes, including the blog posts attendees write about the talks and events.

And the "cartoon caption contest" (courtesy of Mary Wootters) has started, along with the offline scavenger hunt! Here's a teaser: