JACM: Computing in Technology and the Sciences

With the creation of this area, JACM is responding to the growing demand for research contributions by computer scientists that reach outward and into other scientific and technological disciplines. The eighties have seen computer science starting to reach out into disciplines such as microelectronics (VLSI design), telecommunications (network problems), and robotics. In the nineties, new challenges have been taken up by computer scientists in areas such as computational biology. It is to be expected that this type of interdisciplinary research will gain even more importance in the future. In fact it may become one of the pillars of computer science research.

JACM intends to support this development by specifically encouraging contributions with an interdisciplinary character. A nonexclusive list of application areas includes

microelectronics and circuit design (including VLSI design)
telecommunications and networking
traffic systems and analysis
optimization process control in manufacturing
biology, especially molecular biology
chemistry and biochemistry
geology and climatology
physics (e.g. quantum computing)

Contributions fall into two categories:

Class 1 (Theory papers): These papers contribute reasonable abstractions of problems originating in an application area and performing CS-type research on these abstractions. Essential aspects of the quality of such contributions would be either the generic character of the resulting abstract formulations and the depth of the results or a proven relevance of the resulting problem formulation and its solution to the application area.

Class 2 (Interdisciplinary papers): These papers develop advanced computer science methods specifically in order to solve problems inside an application area. The computer science methods can involve models as well as data structures, algorithms, and hardware. The progress in the application is expected to be validated on real-world application data.

It is the second class of papers that is new for JACM. We assume that these papers will often be written by interdisciplinary teams and cite literature from the application area as well as literature from computer science. Also, these papers will adopt figures of merit and standards of evaluation from the application fields. We intend to have class 2 papers reviewed by both computer scientists and experts from the application area or people with a strong interdisciplinary background reaching into the application area.

There will be a focus on discrete methods but I we do not exclude numerical methods and, specially, we encourage contributions linking these two areas.

The area Computing in Technology and the Sciences replaces the area VLSI Computation and Design.

The area editor is

Prof. Thomas Lengauer
GMD-SCAI
Schloss Birlinghoven
53754 St. Augustin
Germany
Tel: +49 2241 14 2777
Fax: +49 2241 14 2656
Email: lengauer@gmd.de
URL: http://www.gmd.de/SCAI/people/lengauer.html