FOCS Test of Time Award – Call for Nominations 2025

FOCS 2025 Test of Time Awards

 

Call for Nominations

 

The 2025 FOCS Test of Time Awards, awarded annually, recognize papers published in the Proceedings of the Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. This is the seventh annual award.  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.

Selection

The winners will be selected by a committee appointed by the FOCS Steering Committee. For 2025 the award committee consists of Julia Chuzhoy (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), Costis Daskalakis (MIT), Irit Dinur (Institute for Advanced Study), Piotr Indyk (MIT), Ryan O’Donnell (CMU), and committee chair Shafi Goldwasser (UC Berkeley). Following  FOCS Steering Committee’s guidelines, consideration of papers coauthored by committee members will be deferred to after their service as committee members ends.

In selecting the Test of Time Award winners, the Committee will pay particular attention to long-term impact. This impact can come in many forms, including:

    Solving a problem of lasting importance,

    Pioneering a new area of research,

    Introducing novel techniques.

The committee expects to select one paper for the award from each of the targeted conference years 1995, 2005 and 2015, but may select either more or fewer papers, as well as papers from non-targeted years. The committee may give awards to papers that are not nominated.