Theory of Computing ------------------- Title : Special Issue: APPROX-RANDOM 2013: Guest Editors' Foreword Authors : Sofya Raskhodnikova and Ola Svensson Volume : 11 Number : 8 Pages : 237-239 URL : https://theoryofcomputing.org/articles/v011a008 Abstract -------- Special Issue: APPROX-RANDOM 2013 Guest Editors' Foreword This collection comprises the fully refereed and expanded versions of selected papers presented at the 16th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 2013) and the 17th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM 2013) held at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, August 21 -- August 23, 2013. The selection was made by the program committees of the respective meetings (listed below). Preliminary versions of the papers were presented at the workshops and the extended abstracts appeared in the proceedings of the meetings published by Springer. The APPROX Program Committee selected 23 out of 46 submissions for presentation at the Workshop; of these, 3 were invited to this Special Issue. The RANDOM Program Committee selected 25 out of 52 submissions; of these, 3 were invited to this Special Issue. The authors of all the six selected papers accepted the invitation. The papers selected from APPROX 2013 cover topics of approximation algorithms and hardness of approximation, while the papers selected from RANDOM 2013 cover topics in differential privacy and learning, property testing, and random structures and processes. All papers were refereed in accordance with the usual rigorous standards of _Theory of Computing_. We would like to thank the authors for their contributions and the anonymous referees for their hard work that helped improve the quality of this issue. It was a pleasure to edit this special issue for Theory of Computing. June 10, 2015 Ola Svensson Guest Editor for APPROX 2013 Sofya Raskhodnikova Guest Editor for RANDOM 2013 APPROX 2013 Program Committee Nikhil Bansal (Eindhoven University, The Netherlands) Chandra Chekuri (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA) Eden Chlamtac (Ben-Gurion University, Israel) Nikhil Devanur (Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA) Uriel Fiege (Weizmann Institute, Israel) Claire Matheiu (Brown University, USA) Ankur Moitra (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA) Seffi Naor (Technion, Israel) Yuval Rabani (Hebrew University, Israel) Prasad Raghavendra (University of California, Berkeley, USA) (Chair) Roy Schwartz (Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA) Mohit Singh (Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA) Ola Svennson (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland) MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (University of Maryland, College Park, USA) Madhur Tulsiani (Toyota Technological Institute - Chicago, USA) Rico Zenklusen (John Hopkins University, USA) RANDOM 2013 Program Committee Amit Chakrabarti (Dartmouth College, USA) Nikolaos Fountalakis (University of Birmingham, UK) Ariel Gabizon (Technion, Israel) Parikshit Gopalan (Microsoft Research - Silicon Valley, USA) Dan Gutfreund (IBM Research, Haifa, Israel) Prahladh Harsha (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India) Thomas Hayes (University of New Mexico, USA) Michael Krivelevich (Tel Aviv University, Israel) Shachar Lovett (University of California - San Diego, USA) Russell Martin (University of Liverpool, UK) Dieter van Melkebeek (University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA) Sofya Raskhodnikova (Pennsylvania State University, USA) (Chair) Shubhangi Saraf (Rutgers University, USA) Christian Sohler (TU Dortmund University, Germany) David P. Woodruff (IBM Research, Almaden, USA) Amir Yehudayoff (Technion, Israel)