The IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) is the flagship conference sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing (TCMF) and covers a broad range of theoretical computer science. It is held annually in the autumn and is paired with its sister conference, the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) held each spring and sponsored by ACM SIGACT.

History

FOCS was founded in 1960 as the Symposium on Switching Circuit Theory and Logical Design. The 1960 conference did not have a separate published proceedings but most of the papers were published in the second half of the proceedings of the 1961 conference. For the 7th instantiation of the conference in 1966, the name was changed to the Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory (SWAT). The greatly increased breadth of the conference led to a name change to its present one in 1975. At that time Alvy Ray Smith produced the distinctive cover art that was a notable feature of FOCS proceedings until FOCS ended the production of printed proceedings in 2010. The stylized FOCS fox logo was created for the 26th FOCS. FOCS celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009.