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 is a notable feature of FOCS proceedings today. The stylized FOCS fox logo was created for the 26th FOCS. FOCS celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009. The 54th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2013), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held in Berkeley, California on October 27–29, 2013 (Sunday through Tuesday). Several workshops and invited tutorial presentations will be given on Saturday, October 26, 2013.