ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM TAAS): Editorial Welcome and Update on State of the Journal, Vision and Ongoing Developments

Welcome and Introduction. It is my greatest honour to welcome you to ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM TAAS). I am honoured and humbled to serve ACM TAAS and the wider community. My sincere gratitude to colleagues and ACM for the vote of confidence. I thank my immediate predecessor, Danny Weyns, for the continuous support, smooth transition and commendable service to ACM TAAS and the wider Software Engineering community. I also pay sincere tribute to Valérie Issarny, who left an immortal stamp for exemplary service, as EiC of ACM TAAS until she sadly left us and passed away in November 2022. ACM TAAS board and community will continue to remember and honour Prof. Issarny’s unique benchmark for service and research excellence, as we embark on another cycle of the journal. I also express my heartful gratitude and thanks to my ACM administrators and colleagues, particularly Yubing Zhai and Arriane Bustillo, for their devotion, professionalism and continuous support for our day-to-day editorial operations.

I cordially pledge to honour the appointment with devotion in service to support colleagues and the wider autonomous and adaptive systems community. The pledge comes with a genuine collegiate commitment to sustain the journal’s prestigious brand for excellence and its reputation for high-quality, rigorous research; to steer activities and themes that contribute to the development, advancement and evolution of the discipline and the health of our community. The pledge comes with a vision to embark on a receptive and agile agenda to address technical, societal and ethical research that underpins current and future developments in autonomous and adaptive systems while sustaining TAAS strength as an archival venue for high-quality foundational research in autonomous and adaptive systems.

The globe has been witnessing an increasing reliance on intelligent, autonomous and adaptive solutions in all walks of life and day-to-day services in support of our digital economy, resilient infrastructure, smart and pervasive living, smart health and wellbeing, logistics, trading, manufacturing, space, communication, transport, security, defence, digital society and so forth. We have been observing reports on revolutionary advancements, scaling up, trending and re-trending leveraging some of the foundational work (e.g., Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data-Driven Simulation Systems and Digital Twins and so forth) to support new human-in/on-the-loop computation modalities; their leverage for ‘live’ and ‘long-lived’ autonomous and adaptive computing systems has been founded. We have been witnessing a surge of legal, ethical and socio-technical research quests and new AI legislations, begging for aligning ethics, morality and responsibility in the outset when specifying, designing, analysing, developing, testing, governing, controlling, operating, evolving and managing autonomous and adaptive systems. The quests have stimulated new chapters of investigations across the globe, calling for embedding ethics and responsible innovation principles in the co-creation, specification, design, testing, verification, operation and use of these systems, considering emerging modes of AI–human teaming, as co-operators or co-engineers. The quests also come with an increasing demand for promoting socio-dependability, trust, fairness, morality, responsibility and ethics at the outset, when realising and managing quality attributes and their tradeoffs, including resilience, scalability, performance, security and self-protection, reliability, anti-fragility, sustainability and so forth. Engineering resilient autonomous and adaptive systems in highly dynamic, heterogeneous and large-scale connected decentralised environments, leveraging disruptive and emerging enabling technologies, continues to be a paramount challenge to our community, promoting investigations into the design and verification of robust self-* and intelligent mechanisms and dynamic architectures. Open challenges include scaling these systems to cater for the diverse types of emergences in these systems, to provide resilient and robust self-* support for context and situational use while maintaining high level of Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) guarantees and socio-dependability. Emerging and disruptive enabling environments such as metaverse, quantum-enabled, neuro-sensing, Internet of Things (IoT), edge and digital twining for autonomous and adaptive Cyber-Physical Systems are among the many environments within the quest.

The challenge lies ahead in keeping the journal distinct, topical and relevant but equally agile and highly receptive to advances in the field and new research quests. Nevertheless, preserving ACM TAAS strong foundational charter and historic commitment to scientific rigour and excellence continue to be a top priority.

It has been 3 months since taking on this service; it is time to update the wider ACM TAAS community, colleagues, prospective authors and readers on new developments and our vision for the journal. The last 2 months have been productive in engaging with colleagues and the wider community to recruit domain experts, update the charter, develop new themes and so forth. What is new?

ACM TAAS Charter Update. ACM TAAS is the flagship journal for high-quality research contributions addressing foundational, engineering and technological aspects supporting the development, management, distribution, intelligence and control and evolution of ‘live’ and ‘long-lived’ autonomous and adaptive systems. ACM TAAS seeks technical contributions, covering foundational and translational research into system specification, design, system software architectures, testing, verification and model checking, supporting the development, management, distribution, intelligence and control, emergence and evolution of ‘live’ and ‘long-lived’ autonomous and adaptive systems. We seek results supported by thorough experimental validation, empirical studies, theoretical proofs, simulation, non-trivial demonstrators, prototypes, proof of concepts and/or case studies. ACM TAAS encourages foundational research and applications, leveraging sound ‘synergies’ and ‘metaphors,’ that seek inspiration from other disciplines and systems (e.g., nature, biological, chemical, control, economics, finance, cognition, perception, animal behaviour, ecology, law and governance) to inform the requirements, design, software systems architecture, testing and verification of underlying mechanisms of current and next generation of autonomous and adaptive systems and their autonomic coordination, control and management for emergence. ACM TAAS extends its technical focus and welcomes contributions reporting on foundational research and cutting-edge solutions that address timely socio-technical research and embed responsible and ethical alignment in the specification, design, architecture, testing, verification and model checking, maintenance and evolution of autonomous and adaptive systems. The move aims to improve the realism of the research, relevance to wider beneficiaries and to promote socio-dependability, trust, morality and responsibility in the design and engineering and ethical use of autonomous and adaptive systems. ACM TAAS takes a bold initiative to encourage contributions reporting on ‘futuristic’ and ‘blue skies’ research into the next generation of autonomous and adaptive systems, enabled by disruptive and future technologies (e.g., quantum-enabled, neuro-sensing, metaverse) and new modalities of dynamic data-driven computations (e.g., ‘info symbiotic’ digital twinning). For this category, TAAS seeks results taking the form of rigorous foundational research and proof-of-concept, supported by a mix of demonstrators, experimental validation, simulation and/or appraisals for ethics, responsibility and social fit. ACM TAAS welcomes high-quality regular papers, surveys, themed papers, and special issues as a measure for appealing to a wider audience. ACM TAAS will thrive for publishing artefacts and tooling linked to these papers, when possible, to encourage reproducibility and as one of the many pathways to impact. TAAS will continue to work with flagship sister conferences (e.g., SEAMS@ICSE and ACSOS) and will work with other flagship/major conferences to archive the finest quality work that contributes to the discipline. The plan is to initiate a journal-first track teaming up with some selected venues.

ACM TAAS New Themes. ACM TAAS will feature new live themes with dedicated area editors, covering (1) Science and Foundation of Autonomous and Adaptive Systems: Theories, Synergies and Metaphors; (2) Trustworthy Societal Autonomous and Adaptive Systems; (3) Modelling, Info-symbiotic Simulation and Digital Twins for Live and Long-lived Autonomous and Adaptive Systems; (4) Large Language Models and Generative AI for Autonomous and Adaptive Systems; (5) Resilient Enabling Infrastructure and Environments for Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (e.g., quantum-enabled, metaverse and augmented reality, neuro-sensing and Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs), cloud/edge); (6) Autonomous and Adaptive Computation Systems and Sustainability—with a focus on sustainable computation and/or computation for sustainability and (7) Disruptive and Futuristic Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. Below is a highlight of some of the proposed themes. It is worth noting that some of the issues and challenges are orthogonal to the said themes.

New ACM TAAS Editor’s Special Collection Series. TAAS will work with authority researchers, theoreticians, philosophers, visionaries, practitioners and frontiers in the field of autonomous and adaptive systems and related fields, to steer rigorous research roadmaps, manifestos, perspectives, positions, new synergies, and frameworks contributing to the fundamentals, theory, applications and future of the above thematic areas or emerging trends, under Editor’s Special Collection series. The collection hopes to guide the next generation of researchers in the field, encourage new entrants, strengthen our community and most importantly to serve as a corner for reflection, dialogue and steer to evolve our perspective of the discipline. The initial plan is to have this series by invitation; however, we honour suggestions and proposals that best serve TAAS and our community.

ACM TAAS Advisory Board. ACM TAAS is also honoured to have the support of Bashar Nuseibeh and Danny Weyns, as advisors in the large (as previous ACM TAAS EiCs and representative of key communities) and Patricia Lago, as an advisor for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Sustainability. Mirco Musolesi will serve as an advisor for special issues proposals, joining a team of senior editors and quality assurance monitors for special issues to ensure relevance, content rigour and consistent quality reviews and editorial decisions.

ACM TAAS Editorial Board Update. I have inherited a relatively small board. We are in the process of expanding the editorial board to support new themes as area editor(s) and cover for new expertise; to work and mentor prospective authors as ‘shepherds’ in support of high-quality content; to maintain sound and quality peer-reviewing and editorial decisions; to act as quality monitor and assurer for external special issues and assist our guest editors for consistency and quality content and decisions; to compensate for the varying quality reviews when is needed and to keep editors duties light. The board continues to grow, with the support of authority and senior scientists in autonomous and adaptive systems, domain experts, researchers, scientific community and conference representatives, advisors and so forth. Our expansion is informed by EDI principles and respecting gender balance, regional distribution and a mix of seniority. I thank the overwhelming level of response and support that I have received following the first round of recruitments to serve on TAAS Editorial Board. A second round of invitations is underway to strengthen the support for some areas. Please refer to ACM TAAS web pages for updates.

ACM TAAS Distinguished Expert Reviewers Board. Editorial Board members will have access to a dedicated board of TAAS Distinguished Expert Reviewers, which we thank our predecessors for founding. We will work with editors and the wider community to grow this board over the next year, so we maintain high-quality, sound and timely editorial decisions. We also expect the reviewer board to be a forum for mentoring and training the next generation of editors and associate editors. We will soon nominate colleague(s) to chair; coordinate the board recruitment and admissions and act as quality monitors for TAAS peer-reviewing.

Last but not least, ACM TAAS brand has been a ‘careful craft’ of the tireless work and devotion of its founders, my EiC predecessors, editors, associate editors, ACM administrators, authors, reviewers, readers and the wider scientific community, and their shared value for excellence and commitment to scientific rigour, research relevance and significance. Sustaining ACM TAAS excellence comes with a daunting editorial challenge and complex operational logistics, the key to the health of any mainstream scientific journal: attracting quality submissions; maintaining a responsive, consistent and fair high-quality peer-review process; rapid review turnover; evidence-based fair and transparent editorial decisions; monitoring impact and readership; and not to mention ‘safe navigation’ in the era of AI-generative content, just to name a few. Nevertheless, the service comes with a thrill, excitement and ambition to be part of ACM TAAS brand-crafting workshop, as a humble and modest co-worker, facilitator, mediator, contributor, listener and co-steer for the journal and its community ambition and vision for sustained scientific rigour and excellence. The ambition is backed up by an agile and receptive vision, as infer from the above update, to respond to rapid developments in the research landscape and cater for trends, and emerging needs of the next generation of autonomous and adaptive systems, without diluting the strength of TAAS foundational charter. I sincerely welcome authors, editors, advisors, reviewers, readers, ACM administrators and the wider scientific community to join our crafting workshop. I very much look forward to being an equal delegate and co-worker for our shared vision and commitment to quality and excellence.