Joseph Halpern Is New JACM Editor-in-Chief.

The article presents views of Joseph Halpern, who was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM (JACM) in March, 1997. Halpern is concerned about a growing parochialism among computer scientists, especially at a time when it seems that many of the most exciting advances will come from interdisciplinary work. Halpern recognized the impact of the web on scholarly publishing but believes that with the glut of information available, the need grows even stronger for authoritative, high-quality, refereed papers. Halpern notes that ACM journals continue to be very reasonably priced at a time when most journal prices are increasing rapidly while library budgets are barely keeping up with inflation. Halpern is presently a Professor at the Cornell University Computer Science Department. His major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, distributed computation and logics of probability. He invites comments and may be reached by email at halpern@cs.cornell.edu.