Editorial: Media Center

IT is my pleasure to announce the creation of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems’ (TPDS) Media Center. We hope that the center will attract more readers to the journal, and assist our readers by facilitating their introduction to the latest development in the fi eld, ranging from the design of systems used in some contributions, new exciting technologies, to demonstrating new networking paradigms and solution approaches in the fi eld. It should further promote “systems” content in TPDS as opposed to traditionally prevailing “networking” content, although the latter is by no means excluded from the center. I have appointed new Associate Editor-in-Chief, Yunhao Liu, to handle the TPDS Media Center, together with his associates. He is involved in sensor network and RFID system constructions from hardware design through application development, and has a number of research contributions arising from these systems, primarily on localization, routing, operating systems, network diagnosis and management, and security. He is the principal scientist for the GreenOrbs project www.greenorbs.org in the TianMu mountain and urban sensor network in WuXi, China, each with more than 1,000 deployed sensors (collecting various sensory data, including temperature, humidity, illumination, and carbon dioxide titer), currently the two largest sensor deployments in the world. Yunhao Liu is among the top 10 author contributors to TPDS, and served as a TPDS associate editor before this appointment. His biography appears on the next page and contains a number of distinguished achievements. The TPDS Media Center is designed as a multimedia webpage for this scholarly archival journal. In the Media Center, TPDS will interview outstanding researchers or engineers for their experiences and opinions on a variety of theoretical or technological topics. Meanwhile, we warmly welcome and encourage editors, authors, or volunteers to share and advertise their state-of-the-art projects or ongoing research studies relevant to the topic of parallel and distributed systems through this Media Center. Activities and call for papers (or special issues) of TPDS will be announced through this multimedia platform as well. Each article in the Media Center is in the form of a blog composed by some multimedia content, like a video and audio clip, as the main medium, and supported by certain brief text descriptions. We hope to leverage such brand new features of the Media Center as a driving force for worldwide researchers to contribute high quality and live research results to the community. We hope that you can actively participate in its growth and make it a great success. In order to facilitate the contribution from peer researchers, we have set up an executing board of the Media Center to handle the content submissions from peer researchers. While the current board includes the Assistant EIC, Yunhao Liu (Professor at Tsinghua University, yunhao@greenorbs.com), Executive Chair, Mo Li (Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, limo@ntu.edu.sg), and the assistant, Zhenjiang Li (lzjiang@cse.ust.hk), we will look for the expertise review opinions and inputs from the TPDS AEs as well as the research community. There are two categories of multimedia content that you can contribute. 1) The authors of an accepted regular TPDS paper are encouraged to submit their multimedia content along with their TPDS paper, which we will later select and publish on the media center. 2) Meanwhile, readers are also encouraged to directly submit their content to the executive chair Mo Li (limo@ntu.edu.sg). We’ve provided an FTP site (ftp://transMedia:media2011@ftp.computer.org) to receive the submission of multimedia contents, or you can fi rst publish the submission to some other places (Youtube, your own FTPs, etc.) and send the content links to us. TPDS has resolved its backlog issue, and papers are now published within approximately six months from their acceptance. To meet our annual page budget for 2012, page limit for the main fi le for most papers is back to its maximum, 14 pages. Each paper is still divided into two fi les, the main fi le (which replaces previously called “shortened version”) and the supplementary fi le. TPDS also resumed with organizing special issues. In 2011, calls for papers for two special issues were advertised, one on cyber-physical systems and another on cloud computing. I welcome proposals for future special issues. I take this opportunity to welcome and introduce new distinguished researchers to the Editorial Board of TPDS. Song Guo, David Kaeli, Bronis R. de Supinski, and Kui Wu were appointed as new Associate Editors, starting September 2011, while Manuel E. Acacio joined the board earlier, in April 2011. Their short biographies and areas of research are given below. I am confi dent they will contribute to further enhancing the quality and timelines of TPDS. Fabrizio Petrini, Masafumi Yamashita, John Lui, Sampath Rangarajan, and Cheng-Zhong Xu completed their four-year terms as TPDS editors in September 2011. Their help and dedication in processing papers is greatly appreciated.