Serving the Services Computing Community

SERVICES computing continues to penetrate every aspect of computing and every corner of our cyber space as new information technology emerges, from Internet services, Web services, mobile services, social computing services, cloud services, to big data services and IoT (Internet of things) services. Each time services computing is broadening the scope of computing services in terms of delivery, composition, elasticity and economic scale. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) as a leading journal in the field of services computing has enjoyed continued growth in terms of impact factor, authorship and readership since its inception in 2008. TSCwill celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2017. My four-year term as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of TSC ended on December 31, 2016. It was an honor and a real pleasure to have the opportunity of serving the services computing community through my role as EIC with respect to setting the directions and growing the impact of TSC. I am very proud to see TSC to become not only the most highly regarded archival venue in the field of services computing, but also one of the highly reputable and highly sought-after publication venue in the field of computing and information technology in general. My experience as EIC in the past 48 months has been eye opening for me. I learned from my first-hand experience about the impact and the leadership that a top journal could have in a professional community. I gained true appreciation of the enormous professional and community effort involved in the publication of TSC from the field of services computing. Thousands of authors have submitted their best work to TSC annually and thousands of experts have contributed their scholarly reviews for TSC submissions annually as volunteers. The dedication of TSC editorial board of 50-plus editors has formed a remarkably professional orchestration in the review process through their expert judgment and dedication. The IEEE professional staff members have provided on-demand support for authors, reviewers, and editors. I want to personally thank everyone involved in TSC for making the journal the success that it has accomplished to date. As a part of my farewell address, I would like to specially thank three groups of individuals. First, I would like to thank the associate editors for TSC who are not only thoughtful, dedicated experts with deep expertise but also want to see the services computing community’s research advance and excel. Each year, a large number of TSC manuscripts have gone through a full review process commissioned to associate editors. Upon completing the assessment of the manuscripts about their appropriateness for the journal, associate editors appropriate they assign three experts in the field for review. More critically, when reviews are returned, they synthesize the reviews to provide a coherent message and judgment to the authors about their manuscript. The TSC editorial board consists of a diverse group of experts spanning ten countries, four continents, academia and industry, and provides a broad coverage of services computing research topics and expertise. Second, I would like to thank Rong Chang as Associate Editor-in-Chief. Rong joined me back in 2015 to assess and refine the process by which manuscripts of TSC, especially the submissions to the special issues of TSC are handled. The third group of individuals that I would like to express my deep gratitude are the TSC executive advisory board, consisting of Dr. Liang-Jie Zhang (Chair), Dr. Elisa Bertino, Dr. Ephrain Feig, Dr. Hemant Jain and Dr. Stephen Yau, for their advice and support throughout my service as Editor-in-Chief of TSC. Finally, I would like to introduce and welcome the next EIC of the journal, Dr. James Joshi, a professor of School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Pittsburgh. James has contributed to the strategic directions of TSC as an associate editor of TSC since 2013. I have no doubt that under James Josh’s leadership, TSCwill further thrive in the coming years.