ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

# SIGACT Research Highlights Committee

The goal of the SIGACT Research Highlights Committee is to help promote top computer science theory research via identifying results that are of high quality and broad appeal to the general computer science audience. These results would then be recommended for consideration for the CACM Research Highlights section as well as other general-audience computer science research outlets.

Nomination and Selection Process

The committee solicits two types of nominations:

1. Conference nominations. Each year, the committee will ask the PC chairs of theoretical computer science conferences to send a selection of up to three top papers from these conferences (selected based on both their technical merit and breadth of interest to non-theory audience) and forwarding them to the committee for considerations.

2. Community nominations. The committee will accept nominations from the members of the community. Each such nomination should summarize the contribution of the nominated paper and also argue why this paper is suitable for broader outreach. The nomination should be no more than a page in length and can be submitted at any time by emailing it to sigact.highlights.nominations@outlook.com. Self-nominations are discouraged.

Please submit by October 19, 2020 (Mon).

The Committee

The SIGACT Research Highlights Committee currently comprises the following members:

# 2020 SIGACT Distinguished Service Award, Knuth Prize, and Gödel Prize

We are pleased to congratulate the winners of the SIGACT Distinguished Service Award, Knuth Prize, and Gödel Prize for 2020.

• The SIGACT Distinguished Service Award is awarded to Dieter van Melkebeek for his leadership in creating the Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF) and transitioning the annual Computational Complexity Conference to be run under the auspices of the CCF.
• The Knuth Prize is awarded to Cynthia Dwork for her sustained record of contributions to theoretical computer science over the past four decades.
• The Gödel Prize is awarded to Robin A. Moser and Gábor Tardos for their algorithmic version of the Lovász Local Lemma in the paper “A Constructive Proof of The General Lovász Local Lemma,” Journal of the ACM 57(2): 11:1-11:15 (2010).

# STOC 2020 and TheoryFest to be held online only

Due to the current situation with COVID-19, it was decided that Theory Fest and STOC 2020 will be held online only.

While the organizing committee is still finalizing the format of the conference, authors are being asked to prepare and upload a video recording of a 20-minute presentation of their paper before the conference, so participants can review the videos in advance. Plans are being made to allow for online discussions to happen during the conference itself (third week of June).

More details will be posted here: http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2020/.

# Report on combating harassment and discrimination

The following message is from Sandi Irani, the chair of the ad hoc committee to combat harassment and discrimination in the Theory of Computing community.

A copy of the final report of the committee to address harassment in our community is now posted on the committee web page.

As always, feedback is welcome.