What we do and why

The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity is a new forum for the rapid and widespread interchange of ideas, techniques, and research in computational complexity. The purpose of this Colloquium is to use electronic media for scientific communication and discussions in the computational complexity community. The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC) welcomes papers, short notes and surveys with

• relevance to the theory of computation,
• clear mathematical profile and
• strictly mathematical format.

Central topics

• models of computation and their complexity,
• trade-off results,
• complexity bounds (with the emphasis on lower bounds).
  Specific areas including complexity issues are
  • combinatorics,
  • communication complexity,
  • cryptography,
  • combinatorial optimization,
  • complexity of learning algorithms,
  • logic.

More reading

Here are some papers on the idea and concept of electronic colloquia and ECCC.

• Christoph Meinel, Volker Klotz
  "The first 10 years of the ECCC digital library"
  Communications of the ACM - CACM, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 131-134, 2006.
• Jochen Bern, Christoph Meinel, Harald Sack
  "Electronic colloquia: idea and practice"
  ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication - SIGDOC, pp. 113-119, 1998.
• Jochen Bern, Carsten Damm, Christoph Meinel "The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC): A Digital Library in Use"
  European Conference on Digital Libraries - ECDL, pp. 405-421, 1997.

The collection of all reports published on ECCC in 2010 is now available on DVD. You can order the archive (and also the archive DVDs from earlier years) at the local office.
Please email to eccc@eccc.hpi-web.de for ordering.

With the extension of our scientific board and the implementation of the improved screening mechanism incorporating topics of interest already in the submission process, the ECCC can now provide a clarified Call for Papers.
Please keep in mind, that the ECCC focusses on complexity issues rather than on general algorithmic topics. If you plan to submit, please verify that your work matches the scope of interest defined in the CfP.

We recently modified the ECCC screening mechanism to meet the demand of fast response times of the scientific board. We ask all authors to choose the primary and secondary topics of their papers carefully as we're using this information to decide which editor should review your paper.

We develop a framework for proving lower bounds on computational problems over distributions, including optimization and unsupervised learning. Our framework is based on defining a restricted class of algorithms, called statistical algorithms, that instead of accessing samples from the input distribution can only obtain an estimate of the expectation of ... more >>>

Let $\mathcal{M}$ be a bridgeless matroid on ground set $\{1,\ldots, n\}$ and $f_{\mathcal{M}}: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}$ be the indicator function of its independent sets. A folklore fact is that $f_\mathcal{M}$ is ``evasive," i.e., $D(f_\mathcal{M}) = n$ where $D(f)$ denotes the deterministic decision tree complexity of $f.$ Here we prove ... more >>>

We give an explicit function $h:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$ such that any deMorgan formula of size $O(n^{2.499})$ agrees with $h$ on at most $\frac{1}{2} + \epsilon$ fraction of the inputs, where $\epsilon$ is exponentially small (i.e. $\epsilon = 2^{-n^{\Omega(1)}}$). The same technique also shows that any boolean formula of size $O(n^{1.999})$ over the ... more >>>