Letter From The Editor-In-Chief

Abstract

This last issue of 2008 has been co-edited by Hugo Fuks, the previous editor, and by myself, as newly appointed editor-in-chief. In my first letter to our audience, I take the opportunity to reinforce the major goal of JBCS, which has always been the publishing of relevant original research contributions in all Computer Science areas.The scientific community, acting both as authors and reviewers, play a crucial role in raising the quality of the journal. Therefore, we are particularly grateful to all the authors who submitted their contributions in 2008, and also to our reviewers, whose careful work deserves a special acknowledgment. Moreover, we do hope the scientific community will continue to contribute to JBCS and increase the citation of its papers in their publications.This issue of volume 14 includes four papers on very appealing topics in Computer Science.The first paper, by Mariá Nascimento and Franklina Toledo, addresses a variation of a classical production optimization problem, the multi-plant capacitated lot-sizing problem. Their solution extends and adapts a methodology formerly adopted to solve this problem, employing an adaptive greedy search procedure with setup carry-over. They report experiments where significant improvement of the solution value for this problem was achieved, with a low increase in computational time.The second paper, on machine learning and natural language processing, is by Ruy Milidiú, Cícero Santos and Julio Duarte. They employ Entropy Guided Transformation Learning models to three tasks in Portuguese language processing, namely part-of-speech tagging, noun-phrase chunking and named-entity recognition, obtaining competitive learning performance on different corpora.