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The winner of the 2020 TPS Best Paper Award has been selected (please refer to our TPS home page for details about the award at https://ieee-npss.org/publications/transactions-on-plasma-science/). This year is the second year that the award is being given, and I am pleased to announce that Prof. Chandrashekhar Joshi, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA, is the winner for his article “Laser-driven plasma accelerators operating in the self- guided, blowout regime.” This article appeared in IEEE TPS, vol. 45, pp. 3134–3146, in December 2017. The award plaque, certificate, and cheque will be presented to Prof. Joshi at an upcoming International Conference on Plasma Science in South Lake Tahoe, CA, USA, in June 2021. This is an open-access article and is freely available to our readers. Congratulations to Prof. Chan Joshi on this accomplishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Economic Commission's Statistics of Road Traffic Accidents report of 2011 shows that every year, about 150 000 human beings lose their lives on the roads of the western world. Although it is a common belief that this figure could shrink with the use of new sensor and communication technologies, unfortunately, none such systems have hit the road to date. Ideally, if such technologies were put into place, vehicles could be part of a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) capable of spreading relevant information about dangerous events (e.g., car accidents) to all approaching drivers. However, all this is mainly supported by simulation studies, as no practical results have been published to date, revealing the effective performances of such systems at work. In this paper, we fill this gap, presenting a detailed description of the greatest experiments (a few thousand throughout the streets of Los Angeles), to date, ever performed with an accident warning system specifically devised for highway scenarios. In particular, among all the possible candidate schemes, we ran a few thousand experiments with the accident warning system algorithm that was proven to be optimal in terms of bandwidth usage and covered distance in realistic scenarios. Our experiments confirm what has been observed before in theory and simulation, i.e., the use of such a system can reduce, by as much as 40%, the amount of vehicles involved in highway pileups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in a phased-array system is considered for a non-Gaussian noise environment. In this paper, a robust M-estimation scheme based on Huber's loss function with an adaptive threshold is proposed. The method is evaluated using experimental data from the University of California, Los Angeles, 60-GHz antenna-array system. It is shown that the proposed method enables a decreased sensitivity of the DOA estimates with respect to noise components having heavy-tailed distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software pervades the growing web of computers and communications systems providing diverse services, personal, commercial, financial, public, and entertainment services. Providing timely, cost-effective, high-quality software for these diverse services requires the best possible technology and practice that the software engineering community can provide. The 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) was held in Los Angeles, California. Following the lead of previous ICSE conferences, the aim of ICSE held in the year 1999 was to bring together software engineering practitioners and researchers to present and discuss the most promising approaches for meeting the software challenges of the next century. The February 2001, issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering presents a special section with some of the best papers of the conference held in the year 1999. These papers were selected through an additional review process conducted after the conference. The ICSE '99 program committee selected a number of the best quality papers. The authors of these papers were invited to submit extended versions of their papers for consideration for journal publication.

The papers appearing in this special issue of the "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering" periodical are based on papers that originally appeared in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Data Engineering which was held in Los Angeles, California, on April 25-27, 1984. The paper by Braegger, Dudler, Rebsamen and Zehnder was selected as the best paper at the conference by the awards committee, and concerns a database tool called Gambit. This design tool is based on an extended relational/entity relationship model and assists the designer with a wide variety of subtools. The paper by Farmer, King, and Myers is also about a design tool which is called the Semantic Database Constructor (Sedaco). It is based on a semantic data model which buffers the designer from most low level data structuring issues.

The Third International Conference on Data Engineering was held in Los Angeles, California on February 2 to 6, 1987. The conference was designed as an international forum for bringing together researchers, developers, managers, strategic planners and other users with an interest in the research, design and development of data engineering methodologies, strategies and systems. Its scope includes computer science, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, and computer engineering. It featured papers from all major areas of data engineering, including database design and modeling, performance evaluation, algorithms, integrity, security, fault tolerance, query language, artificial intelligence approaches, knowledge bases, database machines, distributed databases and data engineering applications.