Editorial: A Few Comments Before Leaving the Helm

D EAR TCAS-I Reader, After two years of service as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS (TCAS-I), my term is coming to an end and I am delighted to review with you the activities and endeavors which have been undertaken since January 2008. Despite the fact that there are certainly issues which still need to be addressed, many challenges have been successfully solved and for this, I am deeply indebted to many individuals who contributed all their capabilities and efforts toward TCAS-I: to them go my sincere thanks and deepest appreciation. Before diving into more technical details and data, I wish to share with you some more personal thoughts. Reflecting retrospectively on my service as an EIC for the past four years (including those spent leading the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS), I certainly have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I will surely not miss the numerous deadlines relating to this activity, nor the stress and pressures of attempting to constantly improve the status of the journal and its perception in the scientific community. What I will undoubtedly miss is the sense of community, of “belonging” and even of family that this editorship has brought to me. The most important members of this family are certainly the colleagues forming the TCAS-I Editorial Board (EB), who have been working around the clock to make quick and fair decisions on each manuscript, while performing a thorough review process that has enabled us to increase the high standards of TCAS-I. It has been fun to send/receive messages at impossible hours to (and from) each of them and see issues immediately solved. No EIC could dream of a better group of people to work and interact with! Among them, I owe my deepest gratitude to the many Associate Editors who have been handling a very large number of papers and who have made extra effort in maintaining a quick turnaround time, even when working with an almost impossible load of manuscripts much larger than that they agreed to handle at the beginning, and/or who have also shown particular skills in handling difficult situations. More specifically, I wish to acknowledge with special gratitude the support of Drs. Eduard Alarcon, Bertan Bakkaoglu, Gaurab Banerjee, Mario di Bernardo, Sergio Callegari, Manuel Delgado-Restituto, Andreas Demosthenous, Mauro Di Marco, Zbigniew Galias, Jose Pineda de Gyvez, Hakan Johansson, Eric Klumperink, Yong Lian, Shen-Iuan Liu, Antonio Lopez-Martin, Gabriele Manganaro, Yehia Massoud, Philip K.T. Mok, Gaetano Palumbo, Shanthi Pavan, Eduardo Barros da Silva, Jose Silva-Martinez, Dusan M. Stipanovic, and Wolfgang Utschick. A very important part of this family has also been the members of the Board of Governors (BOG) of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS-S). All of them, in particular, the 2009