Special Section on the Fifty-Third IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2012)

This special section comprises eight fully refereed papers whose extended abstracts were presented at the 53rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2012) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 20--23, 2012. The unrefereed conference versions of these papers were published by IEEE in the FOCS 2012 proceedings. The regular conference program consisted of 79 papers chosen from among 248 submissions. These were selected by a program committee consisting of Susanne Albers, Nikhil Bansal, Mark Braverman, Harry Buhrman, Moses Charikar, Anupam Gupta, Adam Klivans, Swastik Kopparty, Yishay Mansour, Rasmus Pagh, Rafael Pass, Ramamohan Paturi, Sofya Raskhodnikova, Aaron Roth, Tim Roughgarden (chair), Alexander Russell, Amit Sahai, C. Seshadhri, Berthold Vocking, Jan Vondrak, and David Woodruff. The papers invited to this special section were also selected with the input of the program committee. The eight papers in this section span a broad range of topics, including dynamical systems, crypt...