1. Introducing Our Survey Editor

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Christopher Clifton from Purdue University has been "promoted" as Survey Editor for TKDE to look after survey papers for the transactions. Dr. Clifton served as an Associate Editor for 3.5 years before the current Survey editor appointment. He will be developing TKDE survey guidelines with the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor-in-Chief.

2. Five New Associate Editors

TKDE welcomes the following five new Associate Editors who have joined its Editorial Board:

• Professor Elisa Bertino, Purdue University, USA,

• Dr. Minos Garofalakis, Yahoo! Research, USA,

• Dr. Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University, Canada,

• Professor Sameer Singh, Loughborough University, UK, and

• Professor Shichao Zhang, Guangxi Normal University, China.

Their biographies and photos are given below.

TKDE Associate Editors are established researchers in their respective areas, and have been carefully selected based on their research expertise and past publication experience with TKDE.

3. Farewell to Retiring Associate Editors

As an established policy for all IEEE Computer Society transactions, Associated Editors are only allowed to serve a maximum of two successive 2-year terms. The following Associate Editors have completed their two terms,

• Daniel Keim,

• Nick Koudas,

• Rajeev Motwani,

• Ke Wang, and

• Gerhard Weikum.

Also, Dieter Fensel and Johannes Gehrke are stepping down from the TKDE Editorial Board.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of these retiring Associate Editors for upholding the standards of the transactions and rendering their excellent service to the scientific community.

Xindong Wu,

Editor-in-Chief

Elisa Bertino is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and serves as research director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). Previously, she was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Communication at the University of Milan where she has been department chair and director of the DB&SEC laboratory. She has been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, at Rutgers University, at Telcordia Technologies. Her main research interests include security, privacy, database systems, object-oriented technology, multimedia systems. In those areas, Professor Bertino has published more than 250 papers in all major refereed journals, and in proceedings of international conferences and symposia. She is a coauthor of the books Object-Oriented Database Systems-Concepts and Architectures (Addison-Wesley, 1993), Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), and Intelligent Database Systems (Addison-Wesley, 2001). She is a coeditor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal. She serves also on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including IEEE Internet Computing, the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Security & Privacy, and the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security. She has been a consultant to several Italian companies on data management systems and applications and has given several courses to industries. She has been involved in several projects sponsored by the EU. She has served as a program committee member for several international conferences, such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ACM OOPSLA, as program cochair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), and as program chair of the 2000 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP '00), the Seventh ACM Symposium of Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT 2002), and the 2004 EDBT Conference. She is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award "For outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data mangement systems and the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award "For pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems."

Minos Garofalakis received the PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He is a principal research scientist with the Community Systems group at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, California, and an adjunct associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was a senior researcher at Intel Research Berkeley (2005-2007), and a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories (1998-2005). He currently serves as the Core Database Technology PC Chair for the upcoming VLDB '07 conference in Vienna, Austria, and as an editorial board member for Foundations and Trends in Databases. He has also recently completed a term as an associate editor for the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, and has repeatedly served on the technical program committees of all major data-management conferences. His research interests lie in the areas of data-stream management, approximate query processing, probabilistic database systems, network-data management, and XML databases. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.

Jian Pei received the PhD degree in computing science from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 2002. He is currently an assistant professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His research interests can be summarized as developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques for novel data intensive applications. Currently, he is interested in various techniques of data mining, data warehousing, online analytical processing, and database systems, as well as their applications in bioinformatics, privacy preservation, software engineering, sensor networks, and education. His current research is supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IBM, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and the SFU Community Trust Endowment Fund. He has published prolifically in refereed journals, conferences, and workshops. He has also served regularly on the organization committees and the program committees of many international conferences and workshops, and has been a reviewer for the leading academic journals in his fields. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. He is the recipient of the British Columbia Innovation Council 2005 Young Innovator Award.

Sameer Singh is a professor of autonomous systems in the Department of Computer Science, and is the director of the Research School of Informatics, Loughborough University, United Kingdom. He also heads the Computer Vision and Autonomous Systems research group at Loughborough with more than 55 members. His main research focus is on the development of novel sensor data analysis and machine learning techniques that can support semi and fully automated intelligent systems for transportation, security and surveillance, mobile phone networks, and biomedical applications. These diverse applications are complex in nature, depend heavily on advances in machine learning and sensor technology for solving problems, and can benefit enormously from automation. Over the last two decades, Professor Singh has worked at the interface between computer science, engineering, health sciences, and mathematics to develop novel algorithms in the areas of computer vision, and machine learning. Most of this research has been published in various IEEE Transactions and other leading journals. Altogether, Professor Singh has published more than 170 papers in his career and, currently, has more than £2 million research grant income to support his research team. His work is supported by several leading companies, for example, HP Labs, Motorola, Corus Rail, QinetiQ, and government agencies working on transport and national security. He is also highly active in serving on various conference committees, and journals. Notably, he is currently serving as editor-in-chief of the Pattern Analysis and Applications journal by Springer, and is an associate editor of several transactions and journals. In the past, he also served on the journal editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, Pattern Recognition, and Knowledge and Information Systems. He also organizes the ISSPR Summer School on Pattern Recognition which has over time become the leading international training event on pattern recognition and is attended by more than 100 participants annually.

Shichao Zhang received the PhD degree in computer science from Deakin University, Australia. He is a professor and the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology at Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China. His research interests include data analysis and smart pattern discovery. He is one of the pioneers of mining infrequent item sets (negative association rules) of interest, local pattern analysis for mining multiple data sources, matrix method for interval calculus, and matrix probability propagation in belief networks. He has published more than 30 international journal papers, including ACM Transactions, IEEE Transactions, and Information Systems Journal; and about 40 international conference papers, including AAAI, ICML, KDD, and ICDM conferences. He has won four China NSF/863 grants, one Overseas-Returning High-level Talent Research Program of the China Ministry of Personnel, two Australian large ARC grants and two Australian small ARC grants. He is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, serves as an associate editor for Knowledge and Information Systems and the IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin, and has served as a PC (vice-) cochair for AI '05, ICDM '06, PRICAI '06, and PAKDD '07.