Welcome to the first regular issue in 2016. I am looking forward to continue to collaborate with our editors, the editorial team and the technical support to keep up the success of J.UCS. My particular thanks go to all members of the editorial board who reviewed all the articles that made it to publication and particularly to those who reviewed papers that did not make it. Their support is important not only to secure the quality and reputation of J.UCS, but also to show students the standards required for a publication in a scientific journal. As an open access journal mainly financed by universities we consider it also our duty to support students on their way to academic achievement.

A good journal stands and falls with good submissions and high-quality publications. Please consider yourself and encourage your colleagues to submit high-quality articles to our journal. Our aim is also to further extend our editorial board: if you are a tenured Associate Professor or above with a good publication record, please do apply for a membership in our editorial board. To secure the future of the journal, I also want to extend the J.UCS consortium by further partners from the North American and Asia-Pacific region; please contact me if you and your organization are interested in joining and supporting J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we could further improve and develop J.UCS in the future.

As usually, I'd also like to look back on the last year and report another successful year of our journal. Within 5 regular issues 29 regular papers have been finally accepted and published, the overall acceptance rate was 18%. 58 papers in 8 special issues have contributed further in a wide range of emerging research in the broad field of computer science. Overall, authors from 42 countries have contributed their novel research in 2015. We are also very happy to report some 93,223 unique visits and approximately 57,150 full paper downloads. I thank all institutions, reviewers and authors for their valuable support and work.

In the first regular issues of the 2016, we have 6 accepted papers from 7 countries from Europe, Africa and South America. J. Enrique Agudo, Mercedes Rico, and Héctor Sánchez from Spain cover in their paper the design and assessment of adaptive hypermedia games for learning English in preschool. Johanna Björklund and Loek Cleophas from Sweden and South Africa present a taxonomy of algorithms for minimizing deterministic bottom-up tree automata over ranked and ordered trees. Jorge Bozo, Rosa Alarcon, Monserrat Peralta, Tomas Mery, and Verónica Cabezas from Chile explore a new approach of hierarchical clustering to determine clusters of interest for recommending learning resources. Luca Carafoli, Federica Mandreoli, Riccardo Martoglia, and Wilma Penzo from Italy introduce a data management middleware that offers the robustness of a common framework for ITS Services in Smart Cities. Dragos Datcu, Stephan Lukosch, and Heide Lukosch from The Netherlands introduce a collaborative game to explore the different perception of situational awareness and presence in a physical and an AR environment. Finally, Leonel Morgado, Hugo Paredes, Benjamim Fonseca, Paulo Martins, Álvaro Almeida, Andreas Vilela, Filipe Peixinho and Arnaldo Santos from Portugal report their research on a bot spooler architecture to integrate virtual worlds with an e-learning management systems for corporate training.

Allow me to gratefully thank the members of our editorial board for their effort and support to cover also in this issue such high quality contributions.

Enjoy reading!

Cordially,

Christian Gütl, Managing Editor
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Email: cguetl@iicm.edu