It is a great pleasure to see that the shared effort tuned into notable success, and I am happy to announce that the 2016 impact factor of the journal has risen again compared to the previous years. The impact factor is now 0.696, the 5-year impact factor is 0.770. Such a success is only possible because of the excellent reviews and the promotion of our journal by the editorial board, the excellent work of the publishing team and the technical support, the very generous support by the J.UCS consortium, but most importantly by the high quality contributions of the authors.

In the third regular issue of 2017, I am very pleased to introduce four accepted papers by authors from four different countries.

Darius Ašerškis and Robertas Damaševičius from Lithuania examine the effects of motivation reinforcement on player retention in an experiment involving more than hundred players. Grzegorz Blinowski and Krzysztof Szczypiorski from Poland introduce new steganographic techniques for visible light communication which are hiding data in dimming patterns and color visibility dimming (CVD) frames, and adapt methods previously proposed for radio networks, such as using unused header bits and pseudo-corrupted frames to hide data. In a collaborative research between Brazil and United Kingdom, Ademir Aparecido Constantino, Candido Ferreira Xavier de Mendonca Neto, Silvio Alexandre de Araujo, Dario Landa-Silva, Rogério Calvi and Allainclair Flausino dos Santos propose a deterministic 2-phase heuristic algorithm for minimizing the total cost for a large real-world bus driver scheduling problem. Last but not least, Carlos A.B. Mello, Marilia M. Saraiva, Diego P.A. Menor and Ricardo Nishihara from Brazil cover in their work a comparative study of objective video quality assessment metrics.

Enjoy reading!

Cordially,

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