The Top and the Best: Toward Excellence in ITS Research and Development

I T is finally here, and it will mark the beginning of a new stage in the history and development of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS! In 2009, to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of our Transactions and to promote research and development in ITS, the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society decided to accept our proposal of creating the Top 10 List and the Best Paper Awards for papers published during 2000–2009 and each year afterward in TITS , and charged the Top 10 and Best Paper Committees with the task of selection and implementation [1], [2]. The selection process turned out to be much difficult and time consuming than we have initially expected. We have carefully examined each paper and commissioned a group of researchers for a bibliographic study of our publications and their impact during the period of 2000 to 2009, which including both conventional statistical analysis and deep social network analysis for both author/keyword networking and spatial-temporal relations [3], [4]. Still, the task of selecting the best among the bests is daunting, we have ongoing debating and doubts about what are the proper criteria until the last minutes. In the process, we have decided to create a separate category for survey papers and the annual best papers will be selected among all papers published within the previous two years so each paper will have two chances for consideration. As the chair of the committee, I understand the selection process is not perfect and must be improved in many aspects, I will elaborate on the selection criteria and process late in one of my future editorials. Here, is the final result for the Top 10 List and Best Paper Awards for 2000–2012. Conflict resolution problems for air traffic management systems solved with mixed integer programming, " IEEE Transactions on A simple and effective method for predicting travel times on freeways, " IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Detecting stress during real-world driving tasks using physiological sensors, " IEEE A review of conflict detection and resolution modeling methods, " IEEE Transactions on In