Editorial

The Editorial Board in its last meeting decided to make three experiments to popularize CSI Transactions on ICT and to increase the number of channels that can act as potential source of contents for each issue. The first one was to bring out special issues based on conferences held in India. The second one was to align with an advanced program of Government of India and bring out special issues based on the research outcome reported in those programs. The third one was to have special issues dedicated to a subject matter of current interest. The rationale for this decision to experiment was to institutionalize the wonderful work done in India that normally goes unnoticed. Besides, as CSI Transactions on ICT is from a professional society, the Editorial Board felt that such an approach by a journal would foster industry academia collaboration significantly.

Operationalizing the three ideas and actually conducting these experiments became a challenge! India, as the readers are aware has quite a few educational institutions that carry out high end and high quality research, ranging from basic to applied sciences, engineering, and technology. Computer Science and ICT being an all-encompassing discipline, selecting conferences and maintaining focus in each issue and across issues were seen as an operational challenge. We decided to look at representative conferences in 2016 and selected one each from south, north and east. We also insisted that the organizers of these conferences present to us the best, as evaluated by them. We identified three conferences; ICAARS from south, REDSET from north and ICAC from east. While ICAARS had modest number of papers, ICAC had an impressive number, and REDSET had the maximum. We scheduled ICAARS as the March 2016 issue, along with one paper selected from general pool of submissions. We scheduled REDSET across three issues June, September, and December of 2016, as REDSET had an impressive number of papers to be carried. We decided to make it a combined issue to keep the REDSET papers together. Along the same lines, we scheduled ICAC as March 2017 issue.

The second part of the experiment was to align with a Government program, which is directly related to our journal CSI Transactions on ICT. Sir Visveswaraya PhD program, in which the Government of India gives out over 1000 PhD Fellowships, turned out to be an ideal fit. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT) was also keen to collaborate. Since the program has a self-designed three stage filter for selecting publishable material, it naturally crated a win–win situation for the program as well as the journal. The first batch of papers is scheduled as June 2017 issue.

Having explained to the reader the rationale and modus operandi of selecting papers for our journal based on a three-pronged approach suggested by the Editorial Board, I would like to write briefly about the work reported in the current issue– ICAC conference.

International Conference on Advanced Computing (ICAC) was organized by Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad University of Technology (formerly it was West Bengal University of Technology) in October 2016. ICAC is an example of Government sponsored multi-institutional program and collaborative work among institutions, besides being an international conference of repute. All the papers exhibit depth and insight in the problems tackled.

I am sure that readers find this issue extremely interesting.

Enjoy reading!