Editorial—ACRT: Insights and Perspectives on Our Development

Esteemed colleagues,

As another new year approaches and we once again reflect on the achievements in 2024, let us also renew our gaze towards the continually promising future. Thanks once again for your diligence, AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology (ACRT) is leveraging past year’s great start to continue the steady growth. Please accept my humble gratitude for your continuing contributions. As a relatively new journal, ACRT continues to strongly support open access and open science, where authors maintain rights over their intellectual property, and their contributions remain freely available to the world without any paywall restricting society from learning from our esteemed authors. By embracing open science, we also foster transparency, collaboration, and reproducibility in research, aligning with our mission to advance knowledge for the global community.

Over the past years, ACRT’s total views and downloads reached 11,342, reflecting the high quality of work published in the journal and its growing impact on our scope of knowledge. ACRT has also garnered attention from research scholars from more than 14 countries, with an increase in submissions compared to the inaugural years. This growth underscores the journal’s positive trajectory. The acceptance rate, reflecting the journal’s commitment to quality, stands at a median of 35%, reinforcing our dedication to maintaining high standards.

Several of our articles are well-cited and have registered high download rates. The past year, scholars from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Norway, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory published fascinating novel works in mobile robotics and applied artificial intelligence, amplifying search and rescue, providing aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger. Meanwhile, scholars from the Colorado School of Mines presented underground mine emergency evacuation planning. Furthermore, AI and machine learning were presented to transform crop management. 2024 has indeed produced enhancements to societal well–being.

I want to thank our Editorial Board for their strong leadership of six specialized journal sections. I express my sincere gratitude to our reviewers for their exemplary efforts, as well as the unrivaled diligence of our editorial staff. To each of you, I renew my continuing dedication as EIC to support your work uplifting and sustaining the journal’s technical excellence. Your efforts have led ACRT’s burgeoning success. This year, we introduced the Best Paper Award, celebrating exceptional contributions and highlighting outstanding research published in ACRT. In addition to announcing the honors for the first Best Paper cohort, we have also recognized and awarded the best Reviewers for 2024.

To our many supporters, we look forward to continue helping society learn in 2025.

We wish you and yours a wonderful New Year!

Timothy Sands,

Cornell University, USA

AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology, Editor-in-Chief