Intelligent Decision Technologies: An International Journal (IDT) enters its 16th year: A short note from the editors

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. 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].

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

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.

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: [email protected].

Lakhmi C. Jain, PhD, ME, BE(Hons), Fellow (Engineers Australia) is with the Liverpool Hope University, UK and the University of Arad, Romania. He was formerly with the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Canberra 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.

Contact information: KES International, Selby, United Kingdom, email: [email protected]; [email protected].

Junzo Watada, PhD, Msci, Bsci is an IEEE Life Senior Member, a Life Fellow of the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics, Japan, and a Life Fellow of the Bio-Medical Fuzzy System Association, Japan. He has been involved in KES, and especially IDT, for about 30 years. He is a gold member of KES and has received several awards by KES in the past. He also received the Henri Coanda Medal Award from Inventico, Romania, in 2002, and the GH Asachi Medal from the Universitatea Tehnica GH Asachi, IASI, Romania, in 2006. His research interests include big data analytics, soft computing, image processing systems to track human behaviors and understand pictures and videos, knowledge engineering, management engineering, and finance engineering.

Contact information: [email protected]

http://www.f.waseda.jp/watada/; http://www.wcicme. com/watada/.

Chee Peng Lim received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, the University of Sheffield, UK, in 1997. He has published over 450 technical papers in journals, conference proceedings, and books, edited four books and 15 special issues in journals. Recipient of seven best paper awards in international conferences, his research focuses on the design and development of computational intelligence-based systems for pattern classification, decision support, and optimization with application to medical prognosis and diagnosis, fault detection and classification, as well as manufacturing process optimization. He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Decision Technologies.

Contact information: Institute of Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation Deakin University, Australia, email: [email protected].

George A. Tsihrintzis, PhD, MSc, BE(Hons) is Professor in the Department of Informatics in the University of Piraeus, Greece, and served as its Head from Sept. 2016 through Aug. 2020. He received the five year Diploma of Electrical Engineer from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (with honours) and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is co-founder and co-editor of the Learning and Analytics in Intelligent Systems (LAIS) series and the Artificial Intelligence-enhanced Software and Systems Engineering (AI-SSE) series (both published by Springer) and the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies (IJCISTUDIES) (published by Inderscience). His current research interests include Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and Decision Theory and their applications in Artificial Intelligence-enhanced Software, 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 include 5 monographs and 30 edited volumes. He has guest-edited 13 special issues in international journals and has received four best paper awards in international conferences.

Contact information: Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus 185 34, Greece, emails: [email protected], [email protected].

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

In 2021, the IDT Journal reached a milestone of 300 submissions, as well as a record number of 59 published papers. The published papers appeared in two special issues and two regular issues. The editorial notes to the special issues are freely available via the Journal website, as also are three of the published papers. Additionally, five book reviews were also published in 2021 and are also freely available via the Journal website.

In 2022, the IDT Journal enters its sixteenth year The current issue, i.e. issue 16(1), includes 8 regular papers and 12 papers selected for inclusion in a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter was guest-edited by Prof./Dr. Gloria Phillips-Wren, Loyola University Maryland, USA ([email protected]), Prof./Dr. Manuel Mora, Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Mexico ([email protected], dr.manuel. [email protected]), Prof./Dr. Fen Wang, Central Washington University, USA ([email protected]), and Prof./Dr. Jorge Marx Gomez, University of Oldenburg, Germany ([email protected]).

As the pandemic still imposes a major threat to humanity, the IDT Journal wishes to help combat it and, towards this, all 12 papers in the special issue on COVID-19 are freely available at the Journal site.

The current issue also includes a review by Prof./Dr. Du Zhang, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, of a trilogy of books edited in Honour of Prof/.Dr. Nikolaos G. Bourbakis, Wright State University, USA.

We are happy to announce other recent changes that have been effected from this point on, including:

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 will consider the IDT Journal as the proper forum for publication of their research work. We welcome your original research paper submission and remain open to reader suggestions that may improve the Intelligent Decision Technologies Journal further.