Editorial Message From the Incoming Editor-in-Chief

MOBILE computing and systems have become almost an integral part of the daily lives of the people in developed as well as developing countries. Its usage and applications have extended way beyond communication needs, and the proliferation of sensing components has opened a broader scope of application domains. Reliance on a variety of applications running on mobile devices has been growing at a fast rate. The trend is likely to continue both in scope as well as adoption rates. It is thus very critical for research and innovation to keep up with the pace of increasing demands in performance, quality, privacy, security, and other aspects of mobile computing. I am truly honored to be taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) at a time when the signifi cance of the topic is rising at a fast pace. I am deeply grateful to the TMC Steering Committee for giving me this opportunity to shepherd the community’s premier publication venue for the next three years. The past Editors-in-Chief, Tom La Porta, Nitin Vaidya, Mani Srivastava, and Ramesh Govindan, have nurtured and elevated the status of TMC and I will strive to further enhance the value and reputation of the journal. I also take this opportunity to introduce Professor Srikanth Krishnamurthy, who will be working with me as the Associate Editor-in-Chief. I am very thankful to Srikanth and looking forward to working with him as a team. His short biography and photo are included below. TMC has already been established as the leading journal for mobile computing. Although the journal has one of the highest impact factors, the delay from submission to publication hovers around the longest ones among the Computer Society transactions. Challenges for the future include a drastic reduction of the time to publication while enhancing the quality further. In the context of both of these issues, some highly reputed conferences in the area are posing as competition to TMC. We should try to leverage the success of these conferences by ensuring the quality of research is matured further for archival publication in TMC. Partnering with some of the leading conferences for joint publication could be one option. The concept of “journal-fi rst-conference-second” could be also analyzed to fi nd a viable solution. I would also like to continue the efforts of Ramesh Govindan in expanding the topical coverage of TMC to system-level issues including security, applications, and the mobile sensing domains. In order to achieve all of the above mentioned goals, I am seeking help and participation from the authors, reviewers, readers, editors, and the IEEE Computer Society’s publishing staff. I will always be grateful for your help and support.