Evolutionary Applications Summer 2011

<i>Journal of Ecology</i> News

A new Editor team.

Editorial and Retrospective 2008

<i>Journal of Ecology</i> news

Notes from the Editors: Restructuring the Journal of Operations Management

The Times, They Are Changing Again

At the start of my Ph.D. in 1980, I caught a glimpse, purely by chance, of the emerging field of computer-aided design (CAD). It intrigued and fascinated me to such an extent that I ended up scrapping my original plans, switching schools and changing my research area. Even though my new school, Ohio State, was one of only a handful of schools with computing facilities dedicated to CAD, I ran into stiff resistance when I expressed my desire to get a Ph.D. in CAD. I was told that CAD was hardly an intellectually challenging field worthy of a Ph.D. dissertation. I was directed to consider mainstream mechanical engineering areas, such as solid mechanics, vibrations, kinematics, and dynamics. The closest I could get to CAD was to do my dissertation in FEA, which allowed me to do at least part of my work in computing and visualization.When I began my academic career at Arizona State, I thought I was finally free to pursue my true love. But I soon realized that we were still a fringe group; faculty in traditional fields, such as thermofluids and solid mechanics, took a dim view of computational research. The proposed thesis plan for my first graduate student (Expert System for Conceptual Synthesis of Frame Structures) was rejected by the Graduate Chair, who remarked “This is not mechanical engineering.” He viewed it as purely a computer program without any regard for the fact that we needed to explicate, structure, and represent experiential knowledge for structural synthesis not found in any textbook on the subject.Of course, I was not alone in facing this predicament. Fortunately, for misfits like us there was an ASME Division that welcomed us. Originally named the Computer Engineering Division (CED), and later known as Computer &amp; Information Engineering (CIE) Division, it was approved in 1979 and began operating in 1980. Unlike academia, industry was well aware of the potential of computing and information technologies to revolutionize product design and manufacturing. Visionaries from computer industry (CDC, IBM, DEC, Applicon), an infant software industry (SDRC, CV, Swanson), and a variety of OEMs (GM, GE, McDonnell-Douglas) led a grassroots effort to convince ASME of the importance of mechanical engineers active participation in these evolving areas through the creation of a new Division. The first CED newsletter in 1981 boldly heralds “…the dawn of an era that is certain to be dominated by computer technology. All projections indicate that mechanical engineers, more than any other professional group, will be more involved in the utilization of this (computer) technology.” They saw MEs playing as important a role in the IT revolution as their far predecessors had in the industrial revolution—a prediction that was to come true.Prof. Ali Seirig was appointed the first Chair of CED. I am in awe of the progress this new Division made in just the first two years. Twenty-four technical committees were set up and an annual conference was initiated in 1981. This conference was unique in that it was associated with an exhibition of the latest hardware and software from leading vendors. This element was critical in keeping the ASME community well informed about the current state of engineering computing. It is, therefore, not surprising to see that this Division was heavily industry dominated—21 out of 24 Technical Committee Chairs were from industry. Sadly, today industry participation in CIE has sagged. Did CIE change because industry participation diminished, or did industry reduce its participation because CIE became less relevant to their needs? We can only speculate about the reasons.CED soon became the fastest growing Division within ASME. The CED/CIE conference and exhibition attracted participants from a wide range of areas, not just CAD/CAM and FEA but kinematics, robotics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics. This diverse community only had one thing in common, the application of computational methods to problems in their respective fields. As traditional conferences and journals gradually came around to seeing computational methods as valuable contributions in their own fields, they became more accepting of papers of this nature. Thus began the return of computational researchers back to their own discipline communities, shrinking the size of CIE conferences. Finally, in 1994, the CIE conference was colocated with Design Engineering Technical Conferences (DETC).The founders of CED debated the type of journal they needed to have. They felt that given the rapid evolution of computing technologies, an archival journal like an ASME Transactions was not appropriate. At the same time, they wanted their journal to be more technical than a trade magazine. They ended up creating a “hybrid” quarterly publication called CIME (Computers in Mechanical Engineering), with Ali Seirig as its editor. This magazine was produced in full color and was very informative about the latest developments in engineering software. In the words of the editor, CIME was “user-oriented” not “research oriented.” Unfortunately, this philosophy did not command much respect in academia and eventually CIME was merged into ASME’s monthly magazine Mechanical Engineering.And so it came to be that unlike all other ASME conferences and Divisions, CIE did not have any associated journal. Over the years, CIE leaders made several attempts at getting a Transactions journal approved, but to no avail. Reasons for rejection ranged from “computing technologies have no archival value” to the failure to sustain CIME magazine.In 2000, a small group of CIE Division “activists” decided to make another push for a journal. Yong Se Kim, David Lee, Simon Szykman, and David Rosen were the principals in this effort. They came up with a strategy based on lessons from past failures. That included building alliances with three other Divisions (Design, Manufacturing, and Systems &amp; Controls), and demonstrating that an editorial board could be formed with well known researchers who had extensive publication records. I became aware of this effort when I received a call out of the blue, asking me the intriguing question “How would you like to be the Chief Editor of an ASME Transactions?” Of course, the very next sentence brought me down to earth quickly “…the problem is that the journal doesn’t yet exist – will you help us get it approved by ASME?” Thus began my involvement with this journal. We put together an impressive editorial board that included two NAE members and research leaders in each of our targeted areas. Phil Divitero, ASME Director of Publications, immediately saw the marketing potential of this journal, and became a key ally. Bahram Ravani, DED Chair, gave valuable advice on writing our proposal to ASME. Art Erdman, himself a CIE pioneer, happened to be the Chair of ASME Publication Committee, which had authority of approving new journals, which gave us a much needed sympathetic ear on the committee to make our case. In a café in Chicago, before our presentation, we brainstormed various names for the journal and settled on Journal of Computing &amp; Information Science in Engineering (JCISE). The journal was approved and began publishing in the first year of the new millennium, 2001. The CIE Division finally had an archival journal of its own with three cosponsoring Divisions. In 2005, after much lobbying and deliberation, the Design Engineering Division became an equal partner with CIE—an important step in going mainstream.From the very beginning we decided to focus sharply on computational methods for mechanical product development. This set us apart from journals from private publishers that accepted everything and anything related to computing—from gaming to geology, from biology to every branch of engineering. We did not want to dilute our journal with such a wide and general scope. We stipulated that every paper submitted to JCISE must demonstrate applications of its techniques to mechanical design, mechanical analysis, product manufacturing, or quality assurance. Through several iterations we settled on eight major categories to include within the scope of our journal: solid modeling (including parametrics), computational geometry (including reverse engineering), computational metrology (including CMM and tolerance modeling), haptics and virtual reality, engineering informatics, simulation (including FEA, meshing, and optimization), AI/Knowledge based systems, and computer aided manufacturing. Given the practical nature of our field, we also decided to publish papers along two tracks: Research and Application. The latter has subcategories of Software Reviews, Technology Reviews, Tech Notes, and Industry Pilot Projects. The idea was to keep the journal relevant to industry as well as academia. We instituted a three-level rigorous review process for appointment of Associate Editors. We owe it to the founding editorial board for setting sound policies that resulted in quick recognition of JCISE as an archival publication of high quality. That group consisted of Paul Wright, David Rosen, Nick Patrikalakis, Deba Dutta, Susan Urban, Martti Mantyla, Dana Nau, S. Jayaram, Pradeep Khosla, Harry Cheng, and Ravi Rangan. Since we see ourselves as being at the intersection of computer science and mechanical engineering, it was appropriate to have about half of the AEs from each field, and we managed to do so.ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) approached us in 2001 to become an official cosponsor—an offer we gladly accepted in order to strengthen the linkage with our computer science colleagues. From 2001 to 2004, we published a special issue annually drawn from the best papers of the ACM Solid Modeling conferences. Unfortunately, this conference series became too broad, and it was difficult to accommodate their best papers in JCISE without violating our objective of serving the engineering community; this annual tradition of ACM special issues had to be discontinued.ISI included JCISE in its data collection in 2004; after 3 years of this process, the first Impact Factors for JCISE became available in 2007 (for the 2004–2006 period). With respect to ISI Impact Factors, JCISE ranks in the top third of all ASME Transactions; it is better than many long established journals in CAD/CAM and AI areas. Our Impact Factor has continued to improve each year. How meaningful are such statistics in gauging the quality of a journal is debatable. More meaningful metrics are in the offing and we hope they will supplant bean counters of today.When we opened shop in 2000, ASME did not have any web based tool for paper submission and review management. Being the journal focused on computing and information science, we refused to conduct paper reviews the old fashioned way and began developing eLane. With the help of one of our associate editors, Susan Urban, a database expert, and one of her brilliant students, Anish Shah (no relation), we designed and implemented eLane over a period of 3 years. For the past 10 years, we have hosted, maintained, and continuously improved eLane to support not only JCISE but also other journals, such as Research in Engineering Design, and CIE, DTM, and NSF Grantees conferences. eLane blazed a new trail and guided ASME to develop its own “Journal Tool.” Data security and confidentiality is a critical issue in online systems. I am particularly indebted to one of our founding associate editors, Simon Szykman, who provided valuable advice on security aspects of the system by constantly trying to enter the system through unintended holes. It is no surprise that Simon went on to become the first Director of the Cyber-Security group at US Department of Homeland Security and is now the CIO of the Department of Commerce.With Bahram Ravani taking over as the new chief editor of JCISE, we have begun the process of gradually migrating from eLane to ASME’s Journal Tool. Although the Journal Tool still lacks some functionality available in eLane, the reasons for migration are that this will provide greater visibility to JCISE through ASME websites, set JCISE at par with other Transactions, make it easier to transfer papers between ASME journals and, most importantly, have 24/7 support from ASME’s IT professionals.My tenure as chief editor is ending as it started, with a special issue providing snapshots of each of the technology areas within our scope. In both cases, I put together a wish list of papers and expert groups to co-author the state of art reviews. I had hoped to have every area covered, but some papers did not materialize this time around. Nevertheless, this special issue will be a good reference for most, if not all of the areas JCISE covers. For V1 N1, I invited each of our founding Associate Editors to write state-of-the-art surveys of their fields in collaboration with other experts in their respective areas. This special issue contains survey papers not only in some well-established CIE areas but also in a few emerging fields.Computational methods and information technologies related to engineering product development have come a long way. CAD, CAM, FEA, CFD, VR, Reverse Engineering, Computational Metrology, Optimization, and many other simulation techniques are now pervasive in industry. Even traditional fields, such as thermal science, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics, have embraced numerical methods and computer visualization. What started on the fringes is now the mainstream. We owe it to the founders of the CED/CIE Division who saw this potential more than 30 years ago. Let us recognize Ali Seireg (Wisconsin), J. Callahan (McDonnell Douglas), V. Tipnis, T. Shoup (Santa Clara), D. Dietrich (Swanson), L. Hulbert (Battelle), E. Heer (NASA), S. Rhode (GM), R. Fulton (Georgia Tech), J.Cokonis (GE), R. Arvikar (Bell Labs), J. Lemon (SDRC), D. Riley (U. Minnesota), and R. Raghavan (Foster Wheeler).A high quality archival journal is extremely important to any research community. A conference alone cannot be sufficient. Conferences, at least in engineering, serve the purpose of quick dissemination of work in progress. Having an archival journal aids the maturation of a research community. Not all conference papers are suitable for archival in a journal. An additional complication in computing and IT is the rapid rate of development and consequent obsolescence of ideas and methods. What then should we archive? There certainly are many techniques in our field that have withstood the test of time. B-Rep solid models, B-splines, and NURBS, regularized Boolean algorithms, Attributed Adjacency Graph based feature recognition, and bipartite graphs for constraint solving are but a few examples. But most research is incremental, and it is important to archive snapshots of major milestones in each area. NURBS did not just come about suddenly. There were B-splines, rational B-splines before the idea of nonuniform knot spacing.JCISE associate editors serve 3 year terms, renewable for an additional 3. In addition to the founding group of AEs, I want to take this opportunity to thank all our current and past AEs. They are the ones that do the bulk of the work and get the credit for maintaining our high quality. I am very grateful to the following individuals: J. Michopoulos, K. Saitou, A. Goel, I. Grosse, K. Law, X. Qian, J. Oliver, S. McMains, S. Gao, A. Fischer, J. Vandenbrande, C. Geiger, Y. Kitamura, C. McMahon, A. Joneja, S. K. Gupta, R. Crawford, K. Lee, J. Corney, N. Dorighi, L. Joskowicz, and S. Callahan.I am sure that our new chief editor, Bahram Ravani, will take JCISE to new heights. My very best wishes to JCISE readers, authors, and reviewers. For me, this has been a labor of love.

Shining a Spotlight on Photochemistry

Editorial: Twenty‐Five Years Later…

Chaos as opportunity

Guest Editorial: Situational awareness of integrated energy systems

Editor’s Note John N. Duvall This is my final issue as editor of MFS, and I’m pleased that my editor-ship ends with Paul B. Armstrong’s excellent special issue, “Cognitive Modernisms,” that follows. I began working as the associate editor of the journal in January 1999 and took over as editor in the summer of 2001. It’s been a privilege, a pleasure, and an education. Over the years, I’ve vetted more than 6,000 submissions and seen close to 600 essays (and twice as many book reviews) through production. I’ll miss reading those submissions that made me excited to turn the pages—even after the pages became virtual in our online submission system. I’ll miss the bonhomie of our little staff that always has taken pride in never missing a deadline for getting issues to Johns Hopkins University Press. I’ll even miss the impromptu meetings to discuss the minutia of a grammatical issue or to think through how we should cite some strange text not covered by the MLA Handbook. Much less will I miss asking for volunteer labor—readers for essays and book reviewers. I’ve made more than 20,000 such requests over the last two decades. I called not only on members of our splendid Editorial Board but also on hundreds of people with specialized knowledge related to various submissions. Thanks to each and every one of you who answered the call in the service of the profession. Without your intellectual input, MFS simply couldn’t operate. Beginning with Volume 69, Robert Marzec, my associate editor since fall 2007, will take over as editor. Bob took the lead in editing several special issues, most notably “Modern Fiction and the Ecological” (Fall 2009) and “Anthropocene Fictions” (Winter 2018). Joining [End Page 599] him as associate editor is our colleague, Maren Linett, who has twice guest-edited special issues—“Modernism’s Jews/Jewish Modernisms” (Summer 2005) and “Cripping Modernism” (Spring 2019). Without question, MFS will be in good hands for years to come. So many people have helped make MFS a crucial outlet for scholarship on modernist and contemporary fiction. Prior to Bob Marzec, Siobhan Sommerville and Nancy J. Peterson served as my associate editors. Over the years, I’ve relied on the dedicated labor of some of the very best of Purdue’s English doctoral students who have been my editorial assistants. More than simply correcting MLA citation and documentation, the editorial assistants wrote countless queries to authors so that the work appearing in our pages would be not only intellectually stimulating, but also clear, concise, and correct. Here’s a chronological list of the editorial assistants who worked for MFS during my editorship: Diana Gilroy, Celeste Hines, Angela Laflen, Geoffrey Stacks, Carol Fadda-Conrey, Martin Whitehead, Monica Osborne, Rebecca Nicholson-Weir, Michael Mauritzen, Jason Buchanan, Paul X. Rutz, Aaron DeRosa, Stella Setka, Jason Dodge, Rebekah Mitsein, Leah Pennywark, Shaun Clarkson, Marc Diefenderfer, Elizabeth Boyle, Daniel Froid, Alejandra Ortega, Narim Kim, Allyn Pearson, and Matt Morgenstern. “Thank you” doesn’t begin to express my gratitude. William Breichner, Director of the Journals Division at JHUP has always been great to work with. Thanks, Bill, for all you’ve done to support and promote MFS. And finally, kudos to our contributors. You made my job easy. I’ve always said that it would be hard to publish a bad issue because of the consistently high quality of the submissions that came across my desk. I’m not retiring and will remain a member of the Purdue Advisory Board of MFS. I may even read a submission now and then if Bob or Maren ask me. But for now, my work here is done. [End Page 600] Copyright © 2022 Purdue Research Foundation

PROTEOMICS: Into the next decade

The Editor’s Drawers

THIS year’s Nobel prize in chemistry, awarded for the discovery and scientific application of Aequorea victoria fluorescent proteins, also sheds its light on flow cytometry. Flow and image cytometry not only apply fluorescent-protein technology to a myriad of questions but also use one key technology to characterize and purify cells that were transfected with GFP (read more in this month’s Communication by Teodori et al.). Although the majority of the basic works on fluorescent proteins were reported in other journals we have the privilege to publish one of the first reports on the newly discovered very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) by Zuba-Surma et al. (1). This field may prove the next big thing in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. The group reported on the existence of VSELs for the first time only 2 years ago (2). This publication was cited so far over 60 times. Their work in this issue reports on the existence of VSELs in virtually all adult organs of the mouse. Based on the work presented here, the first author was unanimously awarded the ISAC President’s Award of Excellence at the ISAC XXIV Congress in Budapest (May 2008). We honor and highlight her achievements in the present issue by publishing it as a Rapid Publication. This is a rare privilege as it requires a very short reviewing time of 1 week by the reviewers, immediate acceptance or very minor revision and warrants publication in the next print issue. Since 2007 the new Cytometry Part A has awarded only four papers with a Rapid Publication designation (3–6). Many of them are already highly recognized and cited. Let us see how the small stem cells become big. In addition, this publication is a taste of what is to come in our special issue on stem cells in January 2009. This issue will cover different aspects of neuronal, hematopoietic, corneal, endothelial, and of course very small stem cells. The papers focus on characterization, isolation, enrichment and are authored by the leaders in the field. The second highlight of this issue is the manuscript by Pedreira et al. (7). This paper follows the previous publication of the group (8) wherein they showed how to combine different list mode data sets on immunophenotyping to generate hierarchically higher ranking virtual polychromatic flow cytometry. The end of the year is also the time to take a glance back. Looking back on how Cytometry Part A has developed since 2007 until today is encouraging. I would like to express here my gratitude toward all Associate Editors, the Editorial Board members, and the Advisory Board. My particular thanks go to all the reviewers who remain (obviously) unknown. We will acknowledge their work by publishing the list of reviewers in an upcoming issue of the Journal. Editorial board members and reviewers performed excellent and high-quality scientific work to maintain the high standards of the journal. Their workload steadily increases as the number of submitted manuscripts increases—almost 10% over last year—with an attendant increase in recognition of Cytometry Part A by our community. The consequence is, however, that the rejection rate had to go up as the number of print pages is limited, i.e. the number of published manuscripts, remains relatively constant. Consequently, the rejection rate for original submissions including Technical Notes and Brief Reports had to increase from 30% in 2006 to over 44%. This increase was paralleled by reducing the manuscript transit time. I am very pleased to inform you that for 2 years we have maintained the time from submission to first decision to less than 30 days. For this achievement I wish to thank the Associate Editors and the colleagues fromWiley-Blackwell in Hoboken, NJ, for their continuous hard work. The increased manuscript submission rate is in particular due to more imaging, image analysis, and image cytometry articles on these topics. In 2003–2005 more than 60% of our