This special issue of Discrete & Computational Geometry contains a selection of seven papers whose preliminary versions appeared in the Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry, Kyoto, Japan, June 8–11, 2014. The seven papers in this issue were invited, submitted, and then reviewed according to the usual, high standards of the journal. These papers cover a wide spectrum of topics in computational geometry.Chan and Lee propose algorithms for a number of geometric problems in the comparison-based model that achieve optimality in the constant factors of the leading terms. The problems include 2D and 3D maxima, 2D convex hull, segment intersection searching, and point location among axis-parallel boxes in 3D or in a 3D box subdivision.Bonichon, Kanj, Perković, and Xia study the maximum degree of a plane spanner with constant stretch. There is a known lower bound of three, and there has been a series of results that gradually reduce the maximum degree to six. This paper ...