FOCS Test of Time Award – Call for Nominations 2026

The 2026 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 eighth annual award. The target papers for the 2026 Test of Time Awards are those presented at the FOCS conference in 1996, 2006, and 2016. 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 links to DBLP listings for FOCS 1996, 2006, 2016, as well as award winners of previous years.)

Nomination Procedure

Nominations should be sent by July 13, 2026 to odonnell@cs.cmu.edu with a subject line of “FOCS TOT nomination”. Nominations should contain an explanation of the technical achievements and the impact of the nominated paper, 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 2026, the award committee consists of Irit Dinur (Institute for Advanced Study), Piotr Indyk (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Adam Klivans (University of Texas, Austin), Toniann Pitassi (Columbia University), and Vinod Vaikuntanathan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and committee chair Ryan O’Donnell (CMU). Following the 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.