Introducting the New Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers

MY term as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers ends on 31 December 2006 and it is my great pleasure to introduce the new Editor-in-Chief, Professor Fabrizio Lombardi. Fabrizio is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Northeastern University. He has broad research interests in addition to his solid contributions to VLSI Test area. He has served as the Associate Editor-in-Chief of TC since 2000. I have enjoyed working with Fabrizio over the past four years and I am indebted to him for his outstanding contributions as Associate Editor-in-Chief. He brings invaluable experience in dealing with transactions-related issues and I am indeed delighted he has enthusiastically agreed to undertake this responsibility. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the wonderful staff who assisted me during the past four years. The day-to-day operations of TC are handled by dedicated staff at the IEEE Computer Society Publications Offi ce in Los Alamitos, California: Joyce Arnold, Society Publications Coordinator, Kathy Santa Maria, Senior Transactions Production Editor, Steve Wareham, Transactions Electronic Media Assistant 2, Richard Mavis, Transactions Electronic Media Assistant 1, Suzanne Werner, Peer Review Manager, and Alicia Stickley, Group Managing Editor, Periodicals. I would like to thank Aimee Barnard, Henryk Chrostek, and Rosine Sarafi an at the University of Southern California for their assistance in handling submitted manuscripts. I am particularly thankful to Aimee for reminding me on a regular basis to handle TC-related matters in a timely manner. I am thankful to the larger community for considering TC for submitting their work in spite of many alternate avenues that have sprung up over the years. As I step down, I am pleased to note that our projected submissions to TC during 2006 will exceed 400. I am very grateful for the tireless efforts of our anonymous reviewers and the timely efforts of the editorial board and those of the guest editors of the special issues and special sections. I would like take this opportunity to thank them all for their efforts. While our submission rate has gone up, our acceptance rate has been reduced from around 25 percent when I took over to around 17 percent during the past two years. We published 11 special issues and special sections over the past four years. One of my goals was to reduce the time to fi rst decision. During 2006, the average time to fi rst decision has been cut down to around three months, thus reaching the goal set by the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board. This is over 40 percent reduction compared to the average time to fi rst decision during 2003-2004. Our submission to publication time has also dramatically improved over the past two years. As the fl agship journal, TC attracts submissions from all areas of computer science and engineering. As these areas evolve, I am pleased to report submissions from these as well as novel new areas that are being explored by researchers in this community. I encourage you to continue to consider TC as a forum for dissemination of your work.