SPECIAL SECTION ON THE FIFTY-FOURTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (FOCS 2013)

This special section comprises seven fully refereed papers whose extended abstracts were presented at the 54th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2013) in Berkeley, California, October 27--29, 2013. The unrefereed conference versions of these papers were published by IEEE in the FOCS 2013 proceedings. The regular conference program consisted of 79 papers chosen from among 281 submissions. These were selected by a program committee consisting of Alexandr Andoni, Maria-Florina Balcan, Kenneth L. Clarkson, Moritz Hardt, Johan Hastaad, Nicole Immorlica, Yuval Ishai, Yael Tauman Kalai, Tali Kaufman, Jonathan Kelner, Adam Klivans, Amit Kumar, Yury Makarychev, Raghu Meka, Peter Bro Miltersen, Seffi Naor, Harald Racke, Omer Reingold, Mohit Singh, Madhu Sudan, Paul Valiant, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and John Watrous. The program committee was chaired by Omer Reingold. The papers invited to this special section were also selected with the input of the program committee. The seven p...