Invited Articles Foreword

The Invited Article section of this issue consists of three articles. The first is “Approximating Edit Distance within Constant Factor in Truly Sub-quadratic Time,” by Diptarka Chakraborty, Debarati Das, Elazar Goldenberg, Michael Koucky, and Michal Saks, which won the best paper award at the 59th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2018). We want to thank the FOCS’18 Program Committee for their help in selecting this invited article and editor Avi Wigderson for handling the article. The second is “A Constant-factor Approximation Algorithm for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem,” by Ola Svensson, Jakub Tarnawski, and László Végh, which won the best paper award at the 50th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC’18). We want to thank the STOC’18 Program Committee for their help in selecting this invited article and editor Nikhil Bansal for handling the article. The third is “Polynomiality for Bin Packing with a Constant Number of Item Types.” by Michael X. Goemans and Thomas Rothvoss, which won the best paper award at the 2014 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA’14). We want to thank the SODA’14 Program Committee for their help in selecting this invited article.