Editorial

I feel privileged to have been selected as the new Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP). I would like to thank Dr. Martin Giese and Dr. Victoria Interrante for their service as prior EICs, for managing this journal so well, and for their support during the transition period. I feel honored to be working with an exceptional team of associate editors, many of whom have written papers that I have read and learned much from in the past. I also thank the many reviewers, some of whom I know but many more of whom I do not, whose valuable time and diligence has made ACM TAP one of the premiere venues where perception and computation can engage in dialogue and advance one another.

ACM TAP was started in 2004 under the founding editorships of Heinrich Bülthoff and Erik Reinhard. The aim, then as now, was to provide a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship between computer science and psychology. A strong number of successors followed in their footsteps—Roland Fleming, Carol O’Sullivan, Victoria Interrante, Diego Gutierrez, and Martin Giese—who established ACM TAP as a pre-eminent forum to publish in, obtained an impact factor for the journal, and gradually nurtured it to its present value of 1.55. While the prior tradition at ACM TAP has been for there to be two EICs, the ACM Publications Board is seeking to streamline operations with the appointment of only a single one. I hope to maintain and improve the foundations that my predecessors have left me.

Together with the editorial team, I am committed to maintaining the journal’s focus and increasing its impact. A main area of emphasis will be on publishing articles of high quality and giving feedback to authors that is of high quality, regardless of publication outcome. In focusing on quality, I believe that we as a community must embrace the trend toward replicability and reproducibility that many of our colleagues and collaborators are adopting. While I do not intend to make sudden changes to the journal’s procedures, recent concerns in related fields over the soundness of statistical practices, for example, have led to the adoption of practices that seem to raise the quality of publications, such as justifying that studies have ample statistical power. Another area of emphasis will be on streamlining our processes, striving to build the journal as an active source of relevant, novel research. The recent pandemic has stressed both the author and reviewing pipeline, particularly for a journal like TAP with an emphasis on user studies. Refining some of our internal processes for faster turnaround and our communication with authors are steps the editorial team will take to try to improve this situation.

This issue of ACM TAP is the annual special issue containing select, high-quality papers from the Symposium on Computer Animation (SAP). In some form, this special issue has been a part of TAP since its beginnings, with the first such issue occurring in July 2005 and containing papers from the initial Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, the progenitor conference of SAP. I leave the introduction of these articles to the guest editors, Anne-Hélène Olivier and Eakta Jain, but I think you will find, as I did, that they represent an excellent sampling of the interdisciplinary nature of computation and perception. I think that there is more room at ACM TAP for special issues exploring further facets of this relationship in its modern incarnations.