I am very pleased to announce the first regular issue in 2017 which presents 5 high quality paper from 5 countries. Allow me to gratefully acknowledge the effort and support of the members of our editorial board who made the publication of the articles possible. In a collaborative research between Italy and Austria, Egon Börger and Klaus-Dieter Schewe focus their work on the communication in abstract state machines. Christos K. Georgiadis and Nikolaos Polatidis from Greece as well as Haralambos Mouratidis and Elias Pimenidis from the United Kingdom introduce their research on a method for privacy-preserving collaborative filtering recommendations. Findings on design, implementation and evaluation of SPOCs at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid are discussed by Pedro J. Muñoz-Merino, Eva Méndez Rodríguez, Carlos Delgado Kloos and José A. Ruipérez-Valiente from Spain. Umberto Panniello, Lorenzo Ardito and Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli from Italy investigate how users' tendency to seek information affect recommender systems' performance. And last but not least, Mariano Rico, Jaime Ramírez, Diego Riofrío-Luzcando and Marta Berrocal-Lobo from Spain introduce a cost-effective approach for procedural training in virtual worlds.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to look back on another successful year of our journal. In 2016, 20 papers were published in 4 regular issues with an overall acceptance rate of approximately 20%. 8 special issues have contributed with a total of 54 papers in a wide range of emerging and highly relevant topics in the field of computer science. Overall, authors from 38 countries have contributed their novel research in 2016. We are happy to report 74,757 unique visits and approximately 52,329 pdf downloads over the year 2016. The 2015 impact factor of the journal has raised as compared to 2014. The impact factor is now 0.546, the 5-year impact factor is 0.684. This success is only possible due to the great support of the involved institutions, reviewers and authors, and I want gratefully thank all for their valuable support and work.

I am looking forward to continue the work together with our editors, the editorial team and the technical support to keep up the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback how we could even further improve and develop J.UCS in the future.

As in the past we welcome and encourage high-quality original submission to our journal.

Since we aim at further extending our editorial board, please consider joining us: if you are a tenured Associate Professor or above with a good publication record, please do apply for a membership in our editorial board (c.guetl@tugraz.at).

Finally, I also want to extend to J.UCS consortium by further partners from the North American and Asia-Pacific region; so please contact me if you and your organization are interested in joining and supporting J.UCS - it would be great to have you with us!

Enjoy reading!

Cordially,

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