Our submission rate has kept increasing.

From January 1, 2005 to October 14, 2005 (when this editorial was written), TKDE received 480 new submissions in addition to the revised submissions for the papers that were originally submitted in the previous years. This number has increased significantly compared to 2004: Between January 1, 2004 and October 14, 2004, TKDE received only 366 new paper submissions. To the best of my knowledge, the TKDE submission numbers are far higher than any other journal in data mining, database systems, and knowledge engineering. These numbers give TKDE the luxury of selecting the best papers in knowledge and data engineering for publication in our transactions.

In addition to the overwhelming numbers of submissions, as can be demonstrated by the published papers each year, our authors include world-renowned experts, rising stars, and new researchers (such as PhD students) from the international knowledge and data engineering community. This excellent combination of submission numbers and outstanding authors will maintain the "premier" status of TKDE in the field of knowledge and data engineering for the years to come, including data mining, database systems, and knowledge engineering.

Our submission-to-decision time continues to improve.

Since I became editor-in-chief at the beginning of 2005, I have been working closely with Susan Miller, the Transactions Assistant, in sending out regular reminders to associate editors for their timely reviewer assignments, expedited actions on papers stuck in the review process, and overdue recommendations. I have also taken urgent actions on several papers when the corresponding handling editors were not responsive.

Given these regular reminders, and more importantly, the hard work and turnaround efficiency of our associate editors and reviewers, the TKDE time from submission to decision improved from 115.39 days in 2003 and 2004 to 85.74 days so far this year.

We have performed extensive topic area revisions.

To streamline the focus areas of the journal and cover new emerging areas and technological advancements, we have revised TKDE's topic areas with input from the editorial board and approval from the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board. These topic revisions were detailed in the editorial published in the June 2005 issue. The revised topic listing has identified three focus areas (in alphabetic order): 1) data mining, 2) databases and data modeling, and 3) knowledge engineering and intelligent systems. We strongly encourage paper submissions that contribute toward the integration of these focus areas and their underlying computational platforms and emerging applications.

We published two special issues in 2005 and will have three special issues in 2007.

To cover promising research topics, TKDE has kept a tradition of organizing and publishing special issues in a timely manner. We published a special issue on Mining Biological Data in the August 2005 issue, and another special issue on Intelligent Data Preparation in the September 2005 issue.

Meanwhile, to maintain the health of TKDE's current publication queue and to avoid negative impact on the cycle time for our regular papers, we are very selective in special issue topics. We do not have any special issues scheduled for 2006, but in 2007, we will be publishing three special issues on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the Semantic Web Era, Customer Relationship Management: Data Mining Meets Marketing, and Knowledge and Data Management and Engineering in Intelligence and Security Informatics, respectively. Emerging topics on special issues are always welcome, but we will accept special issue proposals in a very careful way.

An Associate Editor-in-Chief was appointed in 2005.

In 2005, we appointed an Associate Editor-in-Chief, Professor Christos Faloutsos from Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Faloutsos helps me with various TKDE activities, as mentioned in the editorial published in the April 2005 issue. We are also working closely on new TKDE initiatives.

Annual Editorial Board meetings will be launched at ICDM '05.

Starting at ICDM '05 in November 2005, we will be having an annual Editorial Board meeting at ICDM and ICDE, at which the associate editors on the Editorial Board and previous Editors-in-Chief are invited to come and discuss their experiences, concerns, and insights, with the Editors-in-Chief and/or the Associate Editor-in-Chief.

Suggestions and advice from these Editorial Board meetings will be taken to the IEEE Publications Office and the Editor-in-Chief for actions.

In 2005, we lost TKDE Associate Editor, Professor Hongjun Lu.

Professor Lu was a great friend, and his scientific contributions in database systems and data mining will be remembered by the research community.

S. Muthu Muthukrishnan retired in November 2005.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Muthukrishnan for his service to TKDE and for helping us with all the papers he has handled.

Nine New Associate Editors have been added.

I would like to welcome the following nine new Associate Editors to the TKDE Editorial Board:

These new Associate Editors are all well-recognized researchers in their respective areas and their biographies and photos are given on the following pages.