FOCS Test of Time Awards
David Zuckerman holds an Endowed Professorship in the Texas Computer Science department.
He wrote to some of us about the 2023 FOCS Test of Time Awards. Note that we just posted about the corresponding STOC awards. The rules are the same.
A Request
David says:
Would you mind posting to encourage people to nominate papers for these awards that target FOCS papers from 1993, 2003, and 2013. Nominations are due this July 31. Details are here.
The winners will be selected by a committee appointed by the FOCS Steering Committee. For 2023 the award committee consists of Jin-Yi Cai (University of Wisconsin), Faith Ellen (University of Toronto), Leonard Schulman (Caltech), Alistair Sinclair (UC Berkeley), Éva Tardos (Cornell University), and committee chair Zuckerman.
He is asking because, as you probably know, often there are fewer nominations for these awards than one might expect. 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.
Open Problems
Here are the previous awards—2022. The 20-year award includes a lattice-based paper by Daniele Micciancio and the 30-year award includes ALMSS and two other papers that set a big agenda for the 1990s and beyond. The initials ALMSS should be uniquely recognizable. Let’s get similar great ones for this year.
Ken and I have some ideas on what and whom to suggest. Hmmm. Let’s help the FOCS committee.
BTW: I should note that, unlike awards like the Goedel Prize or Knuth Prize, nominations are explicitly not required in the charter for these test of time awards. Obviously, getting good nominations is great and getting the community involved in drawing the committee’s attention to specific papers is very useful. However, there is also a lot that the committee can draw on and the pool of candidates is not limited to those receiving nominations.
Thanks, Paul. Dick and I briefly discussed including that in the main body and decided it wasn’t needed for our purpose. (Likewise, if I had been able to come up with a Snark-y logical paradox allusion, it would have detracted.)