FORC 2026: Call for Papers
The 7th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) will be held on June 3-5, 2026 at Harvard University.
Brief summary for those who are familiar with past editions (prior to 2025) of FORC: Following the successful format of FORC 2025, we will continue to have two submission cycles: the first November-December cycle with early author notification and information about accepted papers posted to the conference website, and the second February-March cycle. In addition, the conference’s “non-archival track” has been replaced with a “highlights track” to bring the community’s attention to additional exciting developments. Work featured in the highlights track will be selected through a lightweight nomination process with self-nominations accepted and encouraged.
FORC is a forum for mathematical research in computation and society writ large. The Symposium aims to catalyze the formation of a community supportive of the application of theoretical computer science, statistics, economics and other relevant analytical fields to problems of pressing and anticipated societal concern.
Topics include, but are not restricted to:
- theoretical approaches to fairness in machine learning, including the investigation of definitions, algorithms, lower bounds, and tradeoffs;
- formal approaches to privacy, including differential privacy;
- computational and mathematical social choice, including apportionment and redistricting;
- fairness in allocation and fair division;
- economic incentives, including mechanism design for social good;
- metrics and implications of robustness, including formal methods for explainability;
- bias in the formation of, and diffusion in, social networks; and
- mathematical approaches bridging computer science, law, and ethics.
The Program Committee also welcomes mathematically rigorous work on societal problems that have not traditionally received attention in the theoretical computer science literature, including but not limited to domains such as education, sustainability, housing, climate change and labor markets.
Submitted papers should communicate their contributions towards responsible computing, broadly construed; they should clearly motivate the problem, develop, and present a mathematically rigorous solution, and illustrate how it addresses the problem at hand while also clearly discussing limitations of the proposed method. Submissions should include proofs of all central claims, and the committee will value writing that clearly conveys what the paper is accomplishing. Authors are encouraged to reflect on relevant ethics guidelines (such as the ACM code of ethics or the DFG guidelines for safeguarding good research practice) in shaping their work, dissemination, and submission.
Important Dates and Information
First submission cycle:
- Submission deadline: Tuesday, November 11, 2025 (anywhere on Earth)
- Author notification: Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Second submission cycle:
- Submission deadline: Tuesday, February 17, 2026 (anywhere on Earth)
- Author notification: Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Symposium: June 3-5, 2026
Presentation of Accepted Papers
The symposium will feature a mixture of talks by authors of accepted papers and invited talks. At least one author of each accepted paper should attend the symposium in order to present the work. Requests for virtual presentations will only be considered under exceptional circumstances. A 10-page version of the paper will be published in the proceedings. Dual submissions are not allowed.
Best Paper Awards
All submissions will be considered for the Best Paper award(s). Additionally, submissions with at least one student author will be considered for the Best Student Paper award(s).
PC Member Submissions
Submissions authored or coauthored by program committee members are allowed.
Submission Format
The proceedings of FORC 2026 will be published by LIPIcs. We encourage but do not require use of the LIPIcs format. In lieu of that, please use 11 point font and a single-column format.
Author names and affiliations SHOULD appear on the front page. Reviewing for FORC is single-blind, not double-blind. Otherwise, there are no formatting or length requirements. However, reviewers will only be required to read the first 10 pages of the submission (excluding references); it is the authors’ responsibility that the main results of the paper, their significance and limitations, be clearly stated within the first 10 pages.
As described under “Dual Submission Policy” below, authors who prefer a different final publication format for their work (e.g., to accommodate subsequent publication in a journal) may request an exception by contacting the chair.
Submission Instructions
Submissions site is open.
Papers should be uploaded in .pdf format by the submission deadline.
Authors of papers which are not accepted during the first submission cycle should only consider resubmitting during the second cycle if they believe they have adequately addressed reviewers’ feedback and/or significantly improved their results. Resubmissions should be accompanied by a note describing what changes were made since the first submission.
Dual Submission Policy
Papers that are substantially similar to papers that have been previously published, accepted for publication, have been or would be submitted in parallel to other peer-reviewed conferences with proceedings, may not be submitted. In addition, submissions that are substantially similar to papers that are already accepted or published in a journal at the time of submission may not be submitted.
We welcome the submission of work that is already available without peer review, e.g., technical reports in SSRN, ArXiv, ePrint, or similar.
One-page extended abstract option. To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can ask that only a one-page abstract of the paper appear in the proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper. Authors should guarantee the link to be reliable for at least two years. This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in conference proceedings. Such papers must be submitted electronically and formatted just like papers submitted for full-text publication.
Conflicts of Interest
At submission time, authors should specify PC members who may not be able to objectively review their work, for example, current or past PHD advisor-advisee relationship, affiliation to the same institute, other very close professional or personal relationship, or involvement in an incident of harassment.
Highlights Track
To complement the standard archival publication track of papers, we invite nominations for talks and other activities that will enrich the conference program. (This replaces the “non-archival track” from previous iterations of FORC prior to 2025.) The selection of presentations will be conducted by the program committee. Nominations can be for your own work or for the work of others. Examples of presentations that may be nominated include:
- Talks on individual papers that appeared in a peer-reviewed conference or journal since the last FORC deadline, or for which a public full version is available, e.g., on SSRN, ArXiv, ePrint, or similar.
- Overviews or technical tutorials, possibly spanning multiple talk sessions, of several related papers.
- Other engagement-building activities such as themed panel discussions or open problem sessions.
Nomination Deadline: Tuesday, February 17, 2026 (anywhere on Earth)
Nomination format: The nomination should be no more than one page in length and should briefly describe the proposed paper or activity and why it would make an exciting contribution to FORC. Nominations involving one or more specific papers should include any archival venues at which the work has appeared, link(s) to the publication(s), and the date(s) on which it was published.
The nomination page will be available soon.
Program Committee
- Gavin Brown, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Juan Carlos Perdomo, New York University
- Amrita Roy Chowdhury, University of Michigan
- Aloni Cohen, University of Chicago
- Kate Donahue, MIT and UIUC
- Bailey Flanigan, MIT
- Ira Globus-Harris, Cornell
- Sumegha Garg, Rutgers
- Parikshit Gopalan, Apple
- Cristobal Guzman, Catholic University of Chile
- Lunjia Hu, Northeastern University
- Aleksandra Korolova, Princeton University
- Huijia (Rachel) Lin, University of Washington (chair)
- Brendan Lucier, Microsoft Research
- Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute of Science
- Kobbi Nissim, Georgetown
- Emily Ruth, CMU
- Vatsal Sharan, University of Southern California
- Or Sheffet, University of Alberta
- Adam Smith, Boston University
- Jess Sorrel, Johns Hopkins
- Kunal Talwar, Apple
- Eliad Tsfadia, Bar-Ilan University
- Jon Ullman, Northeastern University
- Or Zamir, Tel Aviv University
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