Editorial: The Era of Quality and Metaverse

First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to Professor Fei-Yue Wang, the founding Editor-in-Chief, and Professor MengChu Zhou, the former Editor-in-Chief, for their trust in me to take over the role of Editor-in-Chief, IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica (JAS) [1], [2]. One can see clearly that under their wonderful leadership, IEEE/CAA JAS has become a young and high-impact publication in the world. They do expect me to lead IEEE/CAA JAS to reach a new high for its service and quality. In fact, IEEE/CAA JAS has set itself an ambitious target of becoming one of the top journals in the world. How to make this happen is a very challenging task. The short path is that IEEE/CAA JAS does its best to attract influential world-class researchers to publish their high quality papers with great impact. However, these world-class researchers have their own favourite journals and they are loyal to these journals. It is very difficult to let these researchers submit their high quality papers to IEEE/CAA JAS. Notice that many early- and mid-career researchers who are ambitious have a strong desire to become world-class researchers. Professor Fei-Yue Wang, Professor MengChu Zhou, and I have an assertion of attracting these ambitious researchers to make their contributions to IEEE/CAA JAS. How can we make this happen? The best approach is that we do our best to provide these researchers the platform in their career developments. In return, these researchers are loyal to IEEE/CAA JAS and submit their high-quality papers to IEEE/CAA JAS. Thus, we established an Early Career Advisory Board (ECAB). The responsibilities of an ECAB member include 1) submitting high-quality papers and inviting for submissions of high-quality work to IEEE/CAA JAS; 2) conducting reviews actively for IEEE/CAA JAS submissions at the request of an Associate Editor, and recommending qualified scholars to serve as reviewers; 3) serving as an ambassador for IEEE/CAA JAS and promoting IEEE/CAA JAS via conferences, academic activities, social media and other channels to audiences around the world; and 4) helping IEEE/CAA JAS organize academic conferences and training. On 22 July 2021, IEEE/CAA JAS issued an Open Call for ECAB Members. We received over 350 applications by the deadline of 20 September 2022. After rigorous evaluation of all the applications, we selected 62 outstanding young researchers to join the first ECAB. On 30 October 2021, we officially launched the inaugural ceremony of the ECAB. In November 2021, I had online individual meetings with most of the ECAB members. During the meetings, the ECAB members and I discussed about how to promote IEEE/CAA JAS and solicit high quality papers to IEEE/CAA JAS. As one of the outcomes of the discussions, we officially launched IEEE/CAA JAS Symposium Series on 15 January 2022. The Symposium Series technically sponsored by IEEE/CAA JAS aims at providing a research venue for researchers, students and control engineers to exchange ideas and discuss the technical trends and challenges in the area of automation science and engineering. The Symposium Series brings together a set of one day or half day symposia at a common site, currently being planned as an online event given the pandemic situation, but IEEE/CAA JAS will be monitoring the pandemic situation and updating this plan soon. The Symposium Series will run multiple times yearly and different symposium topics will be solicited from the current ECAB members. In 2022, the Symposium Series ran 10 times with different topics by over 20 ECAB members. The Symposium Series attracted about 40 outstanding researchers to deliver keynote speeches. There were 315 submissions to the Symposium Series. After rigorous review of all the sub-missions, 117 submissions were selected to be presented at the Symposium Series by authors. Furthermore, these 117 sub-missions were also published in the form of Letter in IEEE/CAA JAS.