SIAM Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (SOSA26)

Submissions

General Information

  • Acceptance Notification

    The Program Committee will distribute official acceptance notices and final paper submission instructions to authors of accepted papers; these instructions must be followed to be included in proceedings. SIAM will subsequently distribute a follow-up notice with registration and participation information. These notices are scheduled to be distributed in October 2025. A list of accepted papers will also be posted online at this time.

  • Speaker Cancellation

    The Organizing Committee expects every speaker in a scheduled presentation to register and attend.

    If it becomes necessary for a speaker to cancel a presentation, they should try to find an alternate presenter immediately, preferably a co-author. See SIAM Policy on Substitute Speakers and Remote Presentations. Email SIAM immediately with any change to a scheduled presentation.

    A “no-show” or cancelled presentation can cause serious inconvenience to the attendees and organizers. The committee thanks all speakers in advance for their compliance to this request.

  • Proceedings

    The proceedings will be posted online in mid-January 2026.

Submission Instructions

How to Participate

Authors must submit their papers electronically, in PDF format. Submissions should begin with a title page containing the paper title, no author information (see below), and an abstract summarizing the contributions of the paper. There is no page limit. The paper should begin with a clear description of the algorithmic problem to be solved, a survey of prior work on the problem, including a candid assessment of prior work in terms of simplicity and elegance, and a discussion of the contributions of the paper. The body of the paper should be written for a general theoretical computer science audience and substantiate the main claims of the paper with full proofs. The submission should be typeset using 11-point font, in a single-column format with ample spacing throughout and ample margins all around. The submissions ought to be visually easy to read.

PC Member Submissions: Submissions authored or co-authored by PC members (other than the PC chairs) are allowed.

Double-Blind Reviewing

SOSA will use (lightweight) double-blind reviewing. Submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors, including authors’ names, affiliations, or email addresses. References to the authors' own related work should be in the third person. However, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors can disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would, e.g. in talks or on arXiv. In case there exist publicly available versions of the submission, authors may mention this in their submission (without providing references/links) and briefly explain the differences, if any. Alternatively, they can communicate such details to the chairs. Questions on double-blind reviewing can be addressed to the PC chairs.

Mihai Pătrașcu Best Paper Award

Beginning in 2026, the SOSA Best Paper award will be named the Mihai Pătrașcu Best Paper Award, named in honor of the algorithms researcher Mihai Pătrașcu, who passed before his time in 2012. Mihai was renowned for his brilliance and ability to solve long standing algorithmic problems. His work was distinguished by its insightfulness and simplicity of design.

The program committee may give the Mihai Pătrașcu Best Paper Award to one or more papers. All submissions will be considered.

Full Paper Submission Deadline: August 7, 2025, 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth

The submission site is available: https://sosa26.hotcrp.com/

For questions related to SOSA submissions, contact the PC Chairs at sepehr@assadi.info and erot@itu.dk.