Intelligent Decision Technologies: An International Journal (IDT) heading into its 18 th year: A Short Note from the Editors-in-Chief

1. Scope and history of the Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT) Journal

Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT): An International Journal (https://www.iospress.com/catalog/ journals/intelligent-decision-technologies) is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of research results and knowledge in the theory and application of intelligent technologies and systems in support of decision making. The IDT Journal is affiliated with KES International (http://www.kesinternational.org/), “a professional community, with networking, research and publication opportunities for all those who work in knowledge-intensive subjects” KES sponsors international conferences on leading-edge topics, including an annual conference for Intelligent Decision Technologies.

The idea of the IDT Journal originated through discussions between Professor/Dr. Gloria Phillips-Wren and Professor/Dr. Lakhmi C. Jain at the Knowledge Engineering Systems (KES) International annual conferences in the timeframe of 2004–2006. The spark that at the time inspired the two Professors to initiate the IDT Journal lay in the fact that, while research mainly focused on algorithms and technical specifications, the technology was also becoming mature enough to be implemented into real-world decision support systems (DSS) for previously intractable problems.

Thus, the IDT Journal was launched in 2007. Profs./Drs. Lakhmi C. Jain and Gloria Phillips-Wren introduced the IDT Journal to the research community with an editorial note stating that “The purpose of this peer reviewed, scholarly journal is to develop a forum for theoretical and applied research that combines artificial intelligence based in computer science, decision support based in information technology, and systems development based in engineering science. Interdisciplinary advances in these fields have the potential to significantly improve individual and organizational decision making. The growth of the internet with its concomitant availability of data has exploded the amount and types of information that must be considered by a decision maker. Decisions must often be made in real-time under uncertain, stressful conditions that may change rapidly. Synergies between intelligent and information technologies can, for example, deliver artificial intelligence to enhance human judgment, perceive anomalies in data, enable collaboration, speed processing of new information, assist in risk assessment, identify and retrieve needed knowledge, suggest alternatives to the decision maker, and automate some decisional tasks. We look forward to the dialogue within this community and welcome your research for publication” [1].

Since its launch, the IDT Journal is in continuous circulation with a new issue published quarterly by IOS Press (https://www.iospress.com/) headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. While in its early days gathering enough papers for an issue required significant time and effort, IDT saw well over 800 submissions in 2023! Moreover, the IDT Journal now has a cite score and an impact factor! The challenge today is how to handle that many submissions and provide guidance to authors. Indeed, IDT has come a very long way!

At the same time, the field of intelligent decision support has been enjoying continuous and rapid expansion in theory, paradigms and real-world systems and applications. This expansion is due to parallel advances and efficiencies in such enabling technologies as (1) Artificial Intelligence (AI); (2) connectivity between devices such as the Internet of Things (IoT); (3) data storage, processing and transmission in distributed, virtualized and network-centric environments (e.g. cloud technologies); (4) remarkable computer and internet transmission speeds; and (5) distributed storage and processing of large datasets across clusters of processors and computers Since many applications involve some type of decision, IDT has expanded its scope and areas of interest and it has grown into an internationally recognizable and impactful forum for original research that has the potential to improve decision making using intelligent technologies [2, 3, 4].

2. Editors-in-Chief

In the past seventeen years, the following persons have undertaken roles as editors-in-Chief of the IDT Journal:

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2007 Founded by Gloria Phillips-Wren and Lakhmi C. Jain

Honorary editor: Robert J. Howlett, Executive Chair of KES

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2010 Gloria Phillips-Wren, Lakhmi C. Jain, Junzo Watada

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2016 CP Lim (managing editor), Gloria Phillips-Wren, Lakhmi C. Jain, Junzo Watada

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2018–2023 George A. Tsihrintzis (managing editor), Gloria Phillips-Wren (special issue editor), Lakhmi C. Jain, Junzo Watada

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2024 George A. Tsihrintzis (managing editor), Gloria Phillips-Wren (special issue editor), Lakhmi C. Jain

Gloria Phillips-Wren, PhD, MS, MBA, MEd, BA (summa cum laude) is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Information Systems, Law and Operations Management at Loyola University Maryland, USA. She is founder and co-editor-in-chief of Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Decision Systems (JDS). She is past chair of the Special Interest Group on Decision Support and Analytics (SIGDSA) under the Association of Information Systems (AIS), a Board member for SIGDSA, an External Examiner for University College Cork in Ireland, Secretary of IFIP WG8.3 Decision Support (DS), and Associate Chair for Knowledge Engineering Systems (KES) International in intelligent decision technologies. She received an award for Outstanding Contribution to KES, one of two selected annually. Her research interests and publications are in decision making and support, data analytics, business intelligence, healthcare technologies, the value of data, and strategic uses of technologies such as social media. Most recently she has been investigating the role of stress and bias in decision making along with the concomitant development of supporting intelligent technologies On September 8, 2023, Prof. Phillips-Wren received the Honorary Award of the Department of Informatics of the School of Information and Communication Technologies of the University of Piraeus, Greece inhonour and recognition of her outstanding scholarly achievements and contributions to the field of Intelligent Decision Technologies.

Contact Information: Sellinger School of Business and Management, Department of Information Systems, Law and Operations Management, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, USA, email: [e-mail].

Lakhmi C. Jain, PhD, Dr. H.C., ME, BE(Hons), Fellow (Engineers Australia) is with the University of Arad, Romania. He was formerly with the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Canberra, the Liverpool Hope University and Bournemouth University. Professor Jain founded KES International (http://www.kesinternational.org/organisation.php) to provide the professional community with opportunities for publications, knowledge exchange, cooperation and teaming. Involving around 5,000 researchers drawn from universities and companies world-wide, KES facilitates international cooperation and generates synergy in teaching and research. KES regularly provides networking opportunities for the professional community through one of the largest conferences of its kind in the area of knowledge engineering systems. Prof. Jain’s interests focus on artificial intelligence paradigms and their applications in complex systems, security, e-education, e-healthcare and unmanned air vehicles. On September 8, 2023, Prof. Jain received a Doctorate in Informatics(Honoris Causa) by the Department of Informatics of the School of Information and Communication Technologies of the University of Piraeus, Greece.

Contact information: KES International, Selby, United Kingdom, email: [e-mail]; [e-mail].

George A. Tsihrintzis, received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (with honors) and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is currently a Professor in The University of Piraeus, Greece and, during 2016–2020, he served as Head of its Department of Informatics. From 2008 to 2022, he served as the Director of the Graduate Program of Study in “Advanced Computing and Informatics Systems” of the Department. During the period 2016–2020, he was a member of the first Administration Council of the University of Piraeus. Currently, he is serving again as a Member of the Administration Council of the University of Piraeus for a four-year term (2022–2026). His current research interests include Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Decision Theory, and Statistical Signal Processing and their applications in Internet-of-Things Technologies, Multimedia Interactive Services, User Modeling, Knowledge-based Software Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, and Information Retrieval. He has authored or co-authored over 350 research publications in these areas, which have appeared in international journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He has served as the principal investigator or co-investigator in several R&D projects. He is the managing editor-in-chief of the Intelligent Decision Technologies Journal (IOS Press). During 2012–2022, he was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies (Inderscience). He has been the editor-in-chief of Engineering Section of SpringerPlus. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Learning and Analytics in Intelligent Systems book series (Springer 2019-) and the Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Software and Systems Engineering book series (Springer 2022-). He has organized and chaired 38 international conferences. He has received best paper awards from several international conferences, and he has been a keynote speaker at several international conferences. He has supervised 15 doctoral students who have received their doctoral degrees and is currently supervising an additional 5 students. He is ranked among the top 2% of the most influential scientists worldwide of Scientists List at Stanford University ranking in the area of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, both careerwise and single year, for 2023.

Contact information: Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus 185 34, Greece, email: [e-mail], [e-mail].

3. Acknowledging, with warm thanks, the outstanding work of the following associate editors of the IDT Journal

The following researchers have taken a lot of their valuable time to perform an outstanding job handling the large number of papers submitted to the IDT Journal in 2023. Without their efforts, the Journal would have been overwhelmed and the paper authors wouldn’t have received valuable guidance towards improving their manuscripts. The Editors-in-Chief are thankful to them and look forward to getting help from them in 2024 as well:

Leonidas Akritidis, Greece

Miltos Alamaniotis, USA

Efthimios Alepis, Greece

Arasteh Bahman, Turkey

Smaranda Belciug, Romania

Sheryl Brahnam, USA

Radhakrishna Bhat, India

Konstantina Chrysafiadi, Greece

Anna Esposito, Italy

Margarita Favorskaya, Russia

Steven Fernandes, USA

Deepak Gupta, India

Jude Hemanth, India

Mirjana Ivanovic, Serbia

Vishal Jain, India

Gregory Koronakos, Greece

Sotirios Kotsiantis, Greece

Fumihiro Kumeno, Japan

Vangelis Marinakis, Greece

Stefano Marrone, Italy

Angelos Michalas, Greece

Manuel Mora, Mexico

Kazumi Nakamatsu, Japan

Dimitrios Panagoulias, Greece

Kostas Patsakis, Greece

Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Greece

Suresh Satapathy, India

Milan Simic, Australia

Achyut Shankar, United Kingdom

Dionisios Sotiropoulos, Greece

Vassilios Verykios, Greece

Shuichiro Yamamoto, Japan

4. Journal indexing and impact factor and cite score

Currently, the IDT Journal has been recognized by the Web of Science as an Emerging Sources Citation Index and is indexed, among others, in

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ACM Digital Library

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Cabell’s Guide or Directory

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Compendex

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DBLP Bibliography Server

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EBSCO databases

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Google Scholar

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Inspec IET

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Microsoft Academic Search

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Scopus

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Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory

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Web of Science: Emerging Sources Citation Index

In 2023, the IDT Journal received its first impact factor (of 1.0) and cite score (of 1.4), which is indicative of the high quality of the work done by both the paper authors and the paper reviewers.

5. Evolution of the numbers of submitted and published papers

Some points that stand out in this graph are the following:

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Over the years, there is a continuous and rapid increase in the number of submitted papers, which is a clear indication of the recognition the IDT Journal has been gaining in academic circles. On the other hand, the number of published papers has risen at a much slower rate. The combination of these two facts implies that the IDT Journal maintains a low acceptance rate (currently well below 20%) which is the result of rigorous review and ensures that only highest quality papers will be published in it.

6. Reflecting on 2023 and IDT volume 17

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In 2023, the IDT Journal reached a record number of 826 submissions, as well as a record number of 79 published papers. The published papers appeared in four regular issues, which included two special collections. The first special collection on “Intelligent Healthcare and Biometric Applications using Deep Learning” appeared in March 2023, while the second special collection on “Data Intelligence” appeared in September 2023. The editorial notes to the special collections are freely available via the Journal website, as also are three of the published papers.

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A particular mention needs to be made of a Special Collection of Eight Invited Original Research Papers on “Contributions by Women in Theory and Applications of Artificial Intelligence” which was curated by Profs. Maria Virvou, George A. Tsihrintzis, Gloria Phillips-Wren and Lakhmi C. Jain. The intent of this special collection was two-fold, as the intent was to (1) highlight the significant research conducted by women in the various fields of the Artificial Intelligence discipline and (2) inspire more women to get involved in studies and research in the various fields of the Artificial Intelligence discipline. The publication of this special collection was also an action towards further improving an important SDG target, namely gender diversity of authors of papers published in the IDT Journal. The editorial note to the special collection is freely available via the Journal website

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Since its publication in March 2023, the paper

Virvou, Maria. ‘Artificial Intelligence and User Experience in Reciprocity: Contributions and State of the Art’. 2023: 73–125

has stood out as the most read among all papers ever published in the IDT Journal and is freely available via the Journal website at https://content.iospress.com/articles/intelligent-decision-technologies/idt230092.

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In addition to the previous, two book reviews were also published in 2023 and are also freely available via the Journal website.

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In other news, IOS Press was acquired by Sage on November 1, 2023. IOS Press had been looking for a long-term publishing home that would allow it to build on 35 years as an academic publisher – operating with an independent spirit that values agility, quality, and accessibility alongside commercial sustainability. With this acquisition, IOS Press staff will continue to operate out of the Amsterdam office with added support, infrastructure, and reach across the globe from Sage. More information on this acquisition can be found at https://www.iospress.com/news/sage-grows-research-portfolio-by-acquiring-ios-press.

7. Heading into 2024 and IDT volume 18

In 2024, the IDT Journal enters its eighteenth year The current issue, i.e., issue 18(1), includes thirty-eight (38) regular papers on various topics within the scope of the IDT Journal. This marks a record number of papers included in a single issue As the number of submitted and published papers is expected to continue to grow, the editors are preparing and taking action to handle this volume of research works and to be able to provide timely guidance and decisions to the paper authors. Specifically:

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A new layer of editors is inserted between the editors-in-chief and the associate editors, namely a set of area/senior editors is created, which will be continuously amended and enhanced

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The list of associate editors and reviewers is constantly expanding and invitations are constantly being sent to outstanding researchers worldwide.

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The editors-in-chief, along with the publisher and the publisher staff are considering publishing IDT Journal issues on a bimonthly rather than on a quarterly basis. If this transition is decided, it will provide faster paper publication and will come into effect in 2025.

On another note, the IDT Journal readers can expect the selected papers of two special issues to be included in issue 18(2) which will appear in June 2024. The first special issue is concerned with “Issues and Trends in Generative AI Technologies” and its submission deadline is set to March 1, 2024. The second special issue is devoted to “High-Performance Computing for SpatialTemporal Data Analytics” and its submission deadline is set to March 30, 2024. To get more information on these special issues, interested authors are encouraged to visit the website of the IDT Journal at https://www.iospress.com/catalog/journals/intelligent-decision-technologies.

Finally, the interested reader may subscribe to freely receive the quarterly IDT Journal newsletter at https://madmimi.com/signups/3ff7158cd5cd44b9bd0700cd3c3cf915/join.

8. Special thanks

Special thanks are due to Reina Steenhuizen, Steffen de Jong, all the editorial assistants, the marketing department, the financial department, and the head of the journal department for the great work they have been doing in getting the IDT Journal published at the highest possible quality.

It is the hope of the editors of the IDT Journal that its readers will not only enjoy the current issue, but they will also find it useful, helpful, and inspiring in their own endeavors and they will consider the IDT Journal as the proper forum for publication of their research work. We warmly welcome original research paper submission and remain open to reader suggestions that may further improve the Intelligent Decision Technologies Journal.