Announcing a Name Change and New Scope

W ELCOME to the first issue of the new year! As you have no doubt noticed, our transaction's name has changed—from IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS PART B: CYBERNETICS to a more concise IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS (TCyb). For the past many months, the publications of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) have been undergoing a major reorganization. The reorganization was based on numerous discussions with the SMCS membership and positive feedback that were received and on recommendations from the 2006 The realignment of the three transactions is meant to help better situate research topics, areas, and articles for the society through its publications. Here are the associated scopes for the three transactions. SYSTEMS includes the fields of systems engineering. It includes issue formulation, analysis and modeling, decision making, and issue interpretation for any of the systems engineering life cycle phases associated with the definition, development, and deployment of large systems. In addition , it includes systems management, systems engineering processes, and a variety of systems engineering methods such as optimization, modeling, and simulation. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS—The scope of IEEE TCyb includes computational approaches to the field of cybernetics. Specifically, the transactions welcomes papers on communication and control across machines or between machine, human, and organizations. The scope of TCyb includes areas such as computational intelligence, computer vision, neural networks, genetic algorithms, machine learning, fuzzy systems, cognitive systems, decision making, and robotics, to the extent that they contribute to the theme of cybernetics or demonstrate an application of cybernetics principles. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN–MACHINE SYSTEMS— The scope of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN– MACHINE SYSTEMS includes the fields of human machine systems. It covers human systems and human organizational interactions, including cognitive ergonomics, system test and evaluation, and human information processing concerns in systems and organizations. What does this all mean for you (as a potential contributor to IEEE TCyb)? Of the three transactions, we were the least affected by the realignment. Our scope has been preserved from IEEE TSMCB (see additional discussions on scope below). As such, I expect that we will continue to grow and expand as we have been over the past decade. As of the writing of this editorial, we are projecting well more than 1600 submissions for 2012, which is yet another record we have been breaking yearly. While this means that the acceptance rates continue to go down (now …