IEEE SMC Transactions on Cybernetics Editor’s Corner

It is my great honor to take the responsibility of Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. As a flagship journal of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society since the inception in 1960, the Transactions and its predecessor has become a leading journal and source of technical knowledge on cybernetics with increasingly high impact, prestige, and popularity. Statistical data show that the impact factor of this Transactions rose to 3.236 and new submissions have increased to well over 1300 in 2013. Since this year, the Transactions is published monthly.

The past success of the Transactions resulted from many factors. One of the important factors is that the Transactions has been and continues to be strongly supported by its society sponsor and its capable volunteer leadership over the past five decades. An important credit should be given to the past Editors-in-Chief; in particular, the immediate past one, Prof. Eugene Santos, Jr., who led us to have brought the Transactions to a new height over the last six years. Thanks should also go to members of the editorial board with about 90 associate editors who were paper quality controllers working with thousands of reviewers to maintain the high technical quality of the publications. Last, but not least, we should be grateful to the authors and readers of the Transactions. The success of the Transactions would be impossible without all their contributions.

As a technical journal, the quality of published papers is of paramount importance. To attract high-quality contributions, the Transactions will maintain its fair and impartial review processes with short review periods, for the best interest of our authors. In addition, to ensure high-quality publications, the Transactions ought to keep its rigorous peer-review procedure, for the best interest of our technical community as a whole.

Every journal has or should have its own identity. As its name reflects, the Transactions is devoted to cybernetics. Cybernetics became a technical term after it was coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 and served as a parental field of several branches of sciences on communication, control, and computation. It has kept evolving over the past 66 years. The scope of the Transactions includes analytical and computational approaches to problem solving for engineering and social systems in the field of cybernetics. Specifically, we welcome submissions on communication and control across machines or among machine, human, and organizations. The scope includes such areas as neural networks, machine learning, evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, cognitive systems, decision making, computer vision, and robotics, to the extent that they contribute to the theme of cybernetics or demonstrate an application of cybernetics principles. Until recently, a number of submissions were rejected after careful initial assessments without further review simply because their topics were outside of the scope of the Transactions. I would like to stress that the Transactions are not a publication for conventional communication/control theory or theoretical computer science. I encourage interested and contributing authors to check and correlate their submissions to the topics of recently published papers in the Transactions to ensure high relevancy of their topics to the scope of the Transactions.

To sustain and prosper, cybernetics also needs revival. To explore new dimensions of cybernetics, the Transactions will keep publishing high-quality papers of novel topics in newly emerging research areas as well as those in normal areas of cybernetics published regularly in the Transactions. Thanks for the efforts of my predecessor and the guest editors, three special issues are in queue. We will try to reduce the backlog by accommodating more proposed special issues dealing with topics of interest in the future. This Transactions will serve as a breeding bed for the renaissance of cybernetics.

Looking forward, I would like to meet the challenges of maintaining the high standards set by my predecessors. I will be open to our technical community (authors, reviewers as well as our editorial board and society committees) for dialogue and welcome all constructive suggestions for improving the operation of the Transactions. I am working hard and will work harder with the editorial board, technical reviewers, contributing authors, society committees, and IEEE staff to ensure the continued success and prosperity of the Transactions.

Author

Jun Wang

Jun Wang (Email)
Editor-in-Chief, Trans. on Cybernetics
Department of Mechanical & Automation Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
Tel: +852-39438472 •
Fax: +852-26036002