The 59th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2027), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), will be held in Atlanta, GA, USA from June 6-10, 2027, as part of FCRC 2027. An AI Day will be held on June 11, 2027.
Papers presenting new and original research on the theory of computation are sought. Typical but not exclusive topics of interest include algorithms and data structures, computational complexity, randomness in computing, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, analysis of Boolean functions, approximation algorithms, cryptography, computational learning theory, continuous and discrete optimization, economics and computation, parallel and distributed algorithms, quantum computing, algorithmic coding theory, computational geometry and topology, computational applications of logic, algebraic computation, and computational and foundational aspects of areas such as machine learning, fairness, privacy, networks, data management, databases, and computational biology. Papers that extend the reach of the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation and analysis, are encouraged. The program committee will make every effort to consider a broad range of areas.
Policy experiments for STOC 2027: In light of rapid advances in generative AI and their impact on research and scientific communication, STOC 2027 is experimenting with several new policies intended to encourage high-quality submissions and promote clear and effective communication of research. The policies below include mandatory public posting and mandatory video submission. Detailed instructions for these two requirements will be released closer to the paper submission deadline.
At a high level, authors should be aware of the following changes:
Exceptions to these policies: If an author requires an exception to any of these policies, they should email the PC chair with a justification for the requested exception.
Submission format: Submissions should start with a title page consisting of the title of the paper, the names and affiliations of all authors, and an abstract of a few paragraphs summarizing the paper's contributions. There is no page limit and authors are encouraged to use the "full version" of their paper as the submission. Each submission should contain within the initial twelve pages following the title page a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of the paper's importance within the context of prior work and a description of the key technical and conceptual ideas used to achieve its main claims. This part of the submission should be addressed to a broad spectrum of theoretical computer science researchers, not solely to experts in the subarea. Proofs must be provided that can enable the main mathematical claims of the paper to be fully verified.
Although there is no bound on the length of a submission, material other than the abstract, table of contents, and the first twelve pages will be read at the committee's discretion. Authors are encouraged to put the references at the very end of the submission. The submission should be typeset using 11-point or larger fonts, in a single-column, single-space (between lines) format with ample spacing throughout and 1-inch margins all around, on letter-size (8 1/2 x 11 inch) paper. Submissions deviating significantly from these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.
Clarity and exposition: Authors are responsible for presenting the main ideas, innovations, and significance of their submission clearly and accessibly within the first 10–12 pages. The program committee will place substantial weight on the quality of exposition, and clarity of technical arguments and proofs (across the whole submission), in evaluating submissions. PC members and reviewers should not be expected to reconstruct the central ideas of a paper from a difficult or opaque presentation, or to search through later parts of a long submission to determine its main contributions. In such cases, papers may be desk rejected based on their low exposition quality.
Author identification and responsibility: STOC 2027 will not use anonymous submissions. The names and affiliations of all authors must appear in the submission. All listed authors must be human. Authors are fully responsible for the contents of their submission.
Review confidentiality: Although submitted papers must be publicly posted as described below, the review process, reviewer reports, and program committee deliberations will be kept confidential. The program committee may consult with journal editors and program chairs of other conferences about controversial issues such as parallel submissions.
PC Member Submissions: Submissions authored or coauthored by PC members (other than the PC chair) are allowed.
Submission limit: An individual may be listed as an author on at most five submissions to STOC 2027.
Recommended Best Practices for References: Authors are encouraged to include hyperlink cross-referencing for bibliographic entries, theorems, sections, and so on, using, for example, the hyperref, cleveref, or varioref packages. If helpful, a table of contents may be added on a page immediately following the title page; this will not count towards the first twelve pages.
Authors are asked to avoid "et al." in citations in favor of an equal mention of all authors' surnames. If the number of authors is large, consider writing "\cite{XYZ} show..." instead of "X et al. show". Bibliographic references should preferably be alphanumeric (e.g., the first letters of the authors' surnames, or at least the first three followed by +) followed by year of publication, instead of just a numerical reference. If using BibTeX, this can be accomplished by using \bibliographystyle{alpha} or \bibliographystyle{alphaurl}.
Conflict of Interest Policy: The submission process will include declaration of conflicts of interest (COI). STOC 2027 will use the following Conflict of Interest Policy, which combines aspects suggested by SafeToC (see here) and the ACM Conflict of Interest policy. Authors should limit their COI declaration to the following categories:
If an author believes they have a valid reason for a conflict of interest not listed above, they can contact the PC chair or any ToC advocate affiliated with this conference directly, including PC members Karl Bringmann, Clément Canonne, and Rafail Ostrovsky. Note that if the program chair has reason to doubt the validity of the claim of conflict of interest, then they may request that a ToC advocate confidentially verify the reason for the conflict. If authors are uncertain, they are encouraged to email the PC chair or a ToC advocate.
Submission Instructions: Authors are required to submit their papers electronically, in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing).
The submission server is not open yet.
Required video submission: Authors must submit a recorded explanation of their paper. Videos submitted for review will not be made public and will be accessible only to the PC and reviewers of the paper. The written submission remains the primary object of review. The video submission deadline will be 1–2 weeks after the paper submission deadline. These are the high-level requirements; the exact deadline and detailed submission instructions will be announced closer to the paper submission deadline.
The recording should be 20–30 minutes long. It must explain the work, its context, and its innovations relative to prior work. Although submitting the video is required, reviewers may choose whether to watch it when evaluating the paper.
The recording should be presented by at least one listed author. It may supplement the paper by providing motivation, intuition, or an overview of the proof structure, but it should not introduce new claims, correct an error, or provide a proof missing from the paper. No elaborate production is required; for example, a simple recording of an author giving a whiteboard talk is sufficient.
Public posting requirement: Every submission must be made publicly available on arXiv. Authors must submit their paper to arXiv before the STOC paper submission deadline. As part of their STOC submission, authors must provide both the submission PDF and either a public arXiv URL or proof of submission to arXiv if the paper is not yet public. The STOC submission PDF must be identical to the corresponding version submitted to arXiv before the paper submission deadline. These are the high-level requirements; detailed instructions will be released closer to the paper submission deadline.
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
Prior and Simultaneous Submissions: The conference will follow SIGACT's policy on prior publication and simultaneous submissions. Work that has been previously published in another conference proceedings or journal, or which is scheduled for publication prior to July 2027, may not be submitted to STOC 2027. The only exception to this policy are prior or simultaneous publications appearing in the Science and Nature journals. SIGACT policy does not allow simultaneous submissions of the same (or essentially the same) material to another conference with published proceedings or a journal. The program committee may consult with program chairs of other (past or future) conferences to find out about closely related submissions.
Presentation of Accepted Papers: One author of each accepted paper will be expected to register and present the work in the form of a talk at the conference. Authors are expected to contact the program chair 3-4 weeks before the conference if they anticipate that circumstances (e.g., international travel restrictions) would leave no author able to attend the conference.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved with ORCID since the start, and we have recently committed to collecting ORCID IDs from all our published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution, and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
Authorship is restricted to humans: Only human individuals may be listed as authors. Generative AI tools may not be credited as authors or co-authors. All listed authors must take full responsibility for the content of the submission.
Disclosure of substantive use: The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to generate or materially affect substantive content must be disclosed at the time of submission in an AI methodologies statement placed at the end of the paper. The disclosure should identify the tool used and indicate which parts of the submission were generated or materially influenced. If such tools play a material role in the research methodology, analyses, experiments, or implementation, this role should also be appropriately described in the body of the paper. Authors may use the following format (if applicable):
AI methodologies: We used [Tool Name] to assist with [Brief Description of Use]. The tool materially affected [Sections X and Y]. More details can be found in [Section Z]. The authors verified the correctness and originality of all content, including references.
Use of AI tools solely for minor copy-editing or grammar/clarity improvements applied to the authors’ own text does not require disclosure. The use of AI tools will not be weighed in the evaluation of the paper by the PC.
Authors are fully responsible for their submissions: Authors are accountable for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of all material in their paper, including any content produced with AI assistance. This includes responsibility for errors, plagiarism, misrepresentation, or fabricated content (e.g., “hallucinatory” references) generated by such tools.
Use of LLMs in reviewing and evaluating papers: PC members and sub-reviewers may use LLMs to assist in reviewing and evaluating the public arXiv version of a paper. Until that version becomes publicly available, they may use LLMs on the submitted PDF. Authors must explicitly consent to both uses as part of the submission process. This permission concerns the paper itself; reviewer reports and program committee deliberations remain confidential. Reviewers remain responsible for their reviews, and all decisions about papers will be made by humans. PC members and sub-reviewers must disclose all AI usage in preparing the review.
STOC 2027 is exploring private LLM-based tools to help authors review papers before submission and to assist PC members and sub-reviewers in evaluating submissions. Details will be released closer to the submission deadline.
Paper submission deadline: Monday, November 2, 2026, 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
Notification date: by email on or before February 1, 2027.
Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: A camera-ready copy of each accepted paper is required by April 1, 2027.
The page limit for the proceedings version is 12 pages.
The format of your paper must strictly adhere to the ACM Format, and specifically the sigconf option. (LaTeX users, please use version acmart v2.16 or newer. You can download the LaTeX class file acmart and the BibTeX ACM Reference Format directly; both are also available from CTAN. Please use the 'sigconf' style by using the following LaTeX class configuration: \documentclass[sigconf,screen]{acmart}).
Additional instructions will be sent directly to the authors of accepted papers.
STOC talks: June 6-10, 2027.
STOC 2027 will be followed by a one-day workshop on AI+TCS ("AI day"), taking place on June 11, 2027.
Publication date: AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)
Best Paper Award: The program committee may designate up to three papers accepted to the conference as STOC Best Papers. All submissions are automatically eligible. In addition to standard COI avoidance, the final designation process will be conducted by the subset of PC Members who have no submissions to the conference. Rules for the award can be found at https://www.sigact.org/prizes/best_paper.html.
Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award: A prize of $500 will be given to the author(s) of the best student-authored paper (or split between more than one paper if there is a tie). A paper is eligible if all of its authors are full-time students at the time of submission. To inform the program committee about a paper's eligibility, check the appropriate box in the web form on the submission server. The list of past winners can be found at https://www.sigact.org/prizes/student.html.
Access to Proceedings: Accepted papers will be published open access in the ACM Digital Library. The committee also intends to provide registered attendees with advance access to the proceedings through a password-protected site, starting about two weeks before the conference and continuing until its end. Authors may opt out of this advance distribution by contacting the program committee chair (deadline to be announced); this does not change the open-access status of the published proceedings.
Student Travel Awards: SIGACT provides travel awards to students without available support, and researchers from developing countries. More information about the award process will be posted later.
ACM’s open access publishing model: ACM conference proceedings are published open access. Publication costs are covered through ACM Open institutional agreements or article processing charges (APCs), subject to applicable waivers and discounts.
For papers not covered by ACM Open, an APC may be required unless a waiver applies. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Eligibility for waivers and discounts is determined by ACM.
Sepehr Assadi, University of Waterloo |
Mrinal Kumar, TIFR |
PC chair of STOC 2027: Shachar Lovett (stoc27chair@gmail.com), University of California, San Diego
Local Arrangements Chair: Dana Randall, Georgia Institute of Technology
Theory Fest Chair: TBD