Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Kybernetes, Volume 43, Issue 8.

This issue of the journal contains both a special issue, comprising four papers, plus six regular papers.

We wish to begin the editorial by reminding potential authors of the value of good keywords. The breadth of topics in submissions to Kybernetes means that finding appropriate reviewers can be difficult (and slow) at times. Our task as editors in finding reviewers is made much easier, and the review process much quicker, if authors use the standard keywords which are presented by ScholarOne as part of the submission process. We have a large database of potential reviewers, and finding the right ones is dependent on the keywords given by authors. It is fine to use some additional specialised keywords, but please start with at least three of the standard keywords from the list.

We have written in a number of past editorials about the importance of good quality submissions to the journal. We continue to receive a very high number of submissions, and are increasingly rejecting articles without review if they do not meet a good quality of English language and conform to the author guidelines (see www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=k and the inside back cover of printed issues of the journal).

Moving to the papers, the special issue has been put together by the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics Society in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It comprises papers presented at the 11th IEEE International Conference on Cybernetic Intelligent Systems (CIS 2012), held from 23 to 24 August 2012 at the University of Limerick, Ireland. We are grateful to Dr Mouraud Oussalah and Prof Ali Hessami for their work in putting together this issue. They give their own introduction to the papers, in the form of a tribute to the late Prof John St. Quinton, whose paper we publish here posthumously.

The four papers in the special issue are as follows.

Chermak, Aouf and Richardson discuss the use of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging for feature tracking: finding the variation between different frames of moving images in image processing. This is useful in a range of applications where automated image recognition is important, such as mobile robots. The authors discuss the usefulness of HDR techniques for feature detection and tracking, and compare it to a number of other techniques.

Abidine, Fergani, Oussalah and Fergani look at the recognition and classification of types of human activity within smart homes, an area of growing importance to an elderly population. After examining a number of possible techniques, they advocate the use of a hybrid approach, combining the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique with Cost Sensitive Support Vector Machines as well as dynamic tweaking of cost parameters. They compare their strategy with other techniques.

Parreira Duarte, El Rhalibi and Merabti present techniques for speech synchronisation with facial animation, useful for CGI techniques in film and games production, but also uses such as virtual reality and medical applications. They discuss their framework and its implementation in software, as well as comparing its use to related techniques.

St. Quinton discusses a mathematical theory developed over some years, a form of semantic category theory. The paper introduces this theory and the related concept of semantic intertwine, and discusses its application to mathematical, philosophical and linguistic problems.

The six regular papers are as varied as ever with Kybernetes. They are as follows.

Afful-Dadzie, Afful-Dadzie, Nabareseh and Oplatková examine the African Peer Review Mechanism, a concept launched in 2003 to spread best practice in governance of African countries and now used in 33 countries. The mechanism is a complex one that can be hard to analyse. The authors suggest an approach for doing this using fuzzy logic combined with the Delphi method. They explain their approach and its benefits and apply its use in practice in one country.

Skaalsvik and Olsen look at service branding: the development and use of brands relating to the service sector. They present a systemic model of the way service brands develop interactively, influenced by the roles of customers, employees and leadership. They discuss the implications of the effective use of this model for all stakeholders in a service brand.

Ma, Ge and Zhang look at environmental issues in China, and specifically the relationship between air quality and economic development in the major cities of that rapidly industrialising country. They analyse the correlation between these aspects in detail for 29 cities, based on a support vector machine model, and draw conclusions for good environmental practice in China.

García de la Cerda and Saavedra Ulloa examine enactive management: the way in which managers can cope with increasing complexity and uncertainty. Drawing on second-order cybernetics and the CLEHES tool they have elsewhere introduced and discussed (including in past issues of this journal), they look at managers as “choreographers of a continuous dance” and discuss the importance of self-observation by effective managers.

Qi, Lou and Cui discuss issues of distributed co-operative control of second-order multi-agent systems. They investigate containment control of such systems using directed topology. As well as presenting their model for understanding containment control,they discuss the simulation of this model and the importance of communication delays.

Jafari Navimipour, Rahmani, Habibizad Navin, and Hosseinzadeh look at the Expert Cloud: the ability to draw upon a wide body of expertise using an internet cloud infrastructure. They discuss the difficulty of job scheduling in such an environment(which they demonstrate is an NP-hard problem), and discuss the use of genetic algorithms to address such scheduling. They compare the effectiveness of their algorithms to other approaches to job scheduling.

We hope you enjoy this issue.

Magnus Ramage, David Chapman and Chris Bissell