New EIC Editorial

IT is my great honor to take the role of Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) to work for readers and authors. I want to take this opportunity to thank Professor Jian Pei, the outgoing editor-in-chief, and all past editors-in-chief for their outstanding vision, service, and leadership. These, together with their relentless commitment, has helped establish TKDE as the world premier journal in the areas of databases, data mining, knowledge engineering, and their applications. Indeed, the last decade has witnessed an unprecedented development in its reputation, quality of publications, and impact. I will try my best to work with you, the readers, authors, and editorial board members to retain the prestige and the quality, and make it even better. Here, I want to share with you my plan to run TKDE during my term as the editor-in-chief, ask you for your kind support, and invite you for your feedback. Many of my thoughts are in fact a continuation of the outgoing TKDE EIC. First, TKDE should continue to serve as a leading venue to fuel the latest developments in data science and address the key applications. In particular, I will work with the associate editors to target strong submissions in key topics that may potentially generate significant impacts, such as Big Data Analytics, Scalable Distributed Data Processing Algorithms, System Developments, etc. TKDE will continue to proactively solicit timely and high quality surveys on emerging strategic directions. I will ensure that such surveys will be reviewed in an express track. I will also approach leading researchers and innovators for possible visionary papers that may benefit a broader research and development community. Second, I will continue our persistent endeavor to enhance the review quality and submission quality of TKDE. I cordially invite researchers to only submit to TKDE their best, most innovative, and thorough work. Our goal is to shorten the turnaround time, enhance the communication quality between authors and reviewers by providing quality and informative review comments, and ensure that only high quality submissions may be accepted in TKDE. TKDE will use the IEEE Outstanding Reviewer Recognition program to acknowledge the excellent reviewers who always provide high quality reviews in a timely, informative, and responsible manner. Third, I will continue our connection with world premier sister conferences. Since 2009, TKDE has published the best papers from the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), while since 2016, ICDE has published TKDE papers, not extensions of conference papers, as posters. This is an excellent win-win situation for both TKDE and ICDE. I plan to continue these exercises. In addition, I will also explore collaborations with other top-tier conferences in the key areas covered by TKDE. Fourth, continuing our effort toward making TKDE papers better received by broader scientific and engineering communities, I plan to pursue experimental repeatability by exploring mechanisms to encourage authors to publish their data sets and source/executable code as supplements to their papers, archived in the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library and IEEE Xplore. Additionally, TKDE welcomes informative and thorough experimental comparative studies on state-ofthe-art methods, as well as concise and informative submissions on novel real data sets and data analytic platforms/tools. Finally, I warmly welcome you to often visit our TKDE homepage and strongly encourage you to participate in our reader and author surveys. Your opinions and suggestions are valuable, and we will try our best to address your needs promptly. As a final note, please join me in welcoming two newly appointed Associate Editors, Professor Gang Chen from Zhejiang University and Dr. Yinglong Xia from Huawei Research America. Happy New Year.