Editorial: A Message from the New Editor-in-Chief

I is a tremendous honor for me to be selected as the next Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of such a prestigious and well-regarded journal as the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC). I am grateful to the Steering Committee for giving me this opportunity to shape the premiere publication forum in my fi eld. This appointment is even more pleasant as becoming the EIC is a sort of coming home event since my fi rst editorial board experience was as an Associate Editor for this journal when it was formed. TMC has been tremendously fortunate to have Tom La Porta and Nitin H. Vaidya as its fi rst two EICs. Together with the Steering Committee and IEEE Computer Society’s publications staff, Tom and Nitin nurtured this young journal through its formative years as it grew from a quarterly journal to a monthly one with one of the highest impact factors. Measures instituted by them, such as increased publication frequency, more pages, and the availability of preprints and rapid posts, have kept the turnaround time low and thus maintained TMC’s relevance in a fast moving fi eld with competition from selective conferences viewed by some as “journal equivalent.” Clearly, following in their footsteps is a challenge. Where should TMC go next? As I have pondered this question in recent weeks, my thoughts keep coming back to one aspect of TMC: the composition of the community—readers and authors—that it currently attracts and serves. Mobile computing is an inherently multidisciplinary area involving intellectual activities not just from networking but also from computing, embedded systems, low-power circuits, wireless signal processing, and applications. Indeed, some of the greatest advances in this fi eld have been driven by innovations from these other areas. It was precisely this multidisciplinary aspect of mobile computing that attracted me to the fi eld some 15 years ago as a fresh graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, trained in embedded systems and VLSI signal processing but surrounded by networking researchers at Bell Labs. Despite the diversity of topics that are in its scope, TMC remains very much a networking-centered journal in the types of papers it currently attracts. My goal is to take the journal in a direction where it refl ects the multidisciplinary nature of mobile computing and becomes the premier journal that covers all aspects of mobile computing. Building on TMC’s mobile and wireless networking core, I hope to also attract a critical mass of contributors and readers from computing, embedded systems, low-power circuits, and wireless signal processing. In the coming months, I shall certainly take concrete steps in reaching this goal, such as expanding the editorial board to include experts in applications, systems, circuits, and signal-processing aspects. My hope is to attract authors from these fi elds and to be able to provide meaningful and fair reviews for their papers. However, to really make TMC refl ect the diversity of mobile computing, we need help from you, our readers and authors. Many of you have broader research activities in mobile computing, and I invite you to submit excellent papers on systems and other aspects. Please help spread this word as well, and in return we promise your papers the timely and high-quality reviews and short decision cycle that TMC is well known for. Last, the success of any journal is built primarily on four groups of people: the contributors, the reviewers, the associate editors, and the publications staff. I would like to thank all of them and express my sincere appreciation for the support they have given to TMC under my predecessors. I look forward to continuing this relationship and receiving your suggestions and ideas for making TMC more valuable for our research community.