Editor's note: Reviewer appreciation program

The IEEE Computer Society (CS) established the Reviewer Appreciation Program (RAP) at the end of 2012, to recognize Distinguished Reviewers. The key enabler for this program is the reviewer statistics, which are made available by S1M. I requested these statistics in 2010 for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) and used them in making decisions on new TPDS editors (as one of factors) in 2011. The information fi nally became available (for all CS transactions) in a reasonable size (Excel) file during 2012, sortable by any column. Therefore, EICs are able to see a list of reviewers sorted by the number of submitted reviews for any time period. RAP intends to recognize our Distinguished Reviewers at the end of each year. Editors were asked to nominate their top quality reviewers (which have no COI with them) for reviews made in 2012. Following 6 nominations by editors, 3 winners (Gilbert Hendry, Zubair Md. Fadlullah, and Ben Leong) were selected. The Outstanding Reviewer Service Award for the TPDS All-Time Most Prolific Reviewer is awarded to Yu-Kwong (Ricky) Kwok. He appears to be our star reviewer called by many editors, and was discovered only by this program (and was immediately invited to become a TPDS editor; please see his short biography). He made, by far, the most reviews (57; 44 as Yu-Kwong plus 13 as Ricky, which came as two separate entries in the file) made for TPDS. Other winners are Jelena Misic (37 reviews), Yu Wang (33), Yingshu Li (32), Jiangchuan Liu (32), Kui Ren (31), Chuan Wu (31), Weisong Shi (28), Haiying Shen (27), Nathalie Mitton (25), Govindarasu Manimaran (24), Song Jiang (23), Hongyi Wu (23), Tian He (22), Xue Liu (22), Henri Casanova (21), Bin Xiao (21), Hannes Frey (20), Mo Li (20), Hai Liu (20), Guoliang Xing (20), Wei Yu (20), Dror Feitelson (19), Stella Kafetzoglou (19), and Qun Li (19). Three of them are new TPDS editors and featured below.