The ITCS 2018 Call For Papers is now available!
ITCS is a conference that stands apart from all others. For a decade now, it has been celebrating the vibrancy and unity of our field of Theoretical Computer Science. See this blog post for a detailed discussion of what makes ITCS so cool and the brief description of ITCS’17 at the end of this post.
ITCS seeks to promote research that carries a strong conceptual message (e.g., introducing a new concept, model or understanding, opening a new line of inquiry within traditional or interdisciplinary areas, introducing new mathematical techniques and methodologies, or new applications of known techniques). ITCS welcomes both conceptual and technical contributions whose contents will advance and inspire the greater theory community.
This year, ITCS will be held at MIT in Cambridge, MA from January 11-14, 2018.
The submission deadline is September 8, 2017, with notification of decisions by October 30, 2017.
Authors should strive to make their papers accessible not only to experts in their subarea, but also to the theory community at large. The committee will place a premium on writing that conveys clearly and in the simplest possible way what the paper is accomplishing.
Ten-page versions of accepted papers will be published in an electronic proceedings of the conference. However, the alternative of publishing a one page abstract with a link to a full PDF will also be available (to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in a conference proceedings).
You can find all the details in the official Call For Papers.
On last year’s ITCS (by the PC Chair Christos Papadimitriou)
This past ITCS (2017) was by all accounts the most successful ever. We had 170+ submissions and 61 papers, including 5 “invited papers”, and 90+ registrants, all new records. There was a voluntary poster session for authors to get a chance to go through more detail, and the famous Graduating Bits event, where the younger ones get their 5 minutes to show off their accomplishment and personality.
The spirit of the conference was invigorating, heartwarming, and great fun. I believe none of the twelve sessions had fewer than 70 attendees — no parallelism, of course — while the now famous last session was among the best attended and went one hour overtime due to the excitement of discussion (compare with the last large conference that you attended).
Windows On Theory 
ITCS last year allowed committee members to submit. Given the size of pc, the cursory few-line reviews of papers, and the number of papers from pc members that were accepted, it seems like a very bad decision. Please do not repeat that this year.