Editorial: Evolution from AI, IoT and Big Data Analytics to Metaverse

Time flies. Since I took over the Editor-in-Chief position from this journal's founding Editor-in-Chief, Professor Fei-Yue Wang in 2018, five years has past just like a second. Looking back from today, as a team, we, including editorial board members, editorial staff members, our early career advisory board members, all contributing authors and all reviewers, should be proud of what this journal has achieved. This journal is the first of its kind of journals, resulting from IEEE’ s collaboration with Chinese Association of Automation-an outside-USA professional organization/institution. We have overcome many barriers and difficulties, and well proven that we, united and working together, can accomplish a challenging mission. We indeed set a great example for IEEE and its many societies to pursue more and more collaboration with other publishers, organizations and institutions from not only China but also such countries as India, Brazil, and Japan.