''Information and Computation'' is a closed-access

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

published by

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

(formerly

Academic Press Academic Press (AP) is an academic book publisher founded in 1941. It was acquired by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969. Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt in 2000, and Academic Press is now an imprint of Elsevier. Academic Press publishes referen ...

). The journal was founded in 1957 under its former name ''Information and Control'' and given its current title in 1987. , the current editor-in-chief is

David Peleg David Akiva Peleg (1942 − 27 November 2013) was an Israelis, Israeli historian and diplomat. From 2004 to 2009, he served as the ambassador of Israel to Poland. He was later appointed director of the World Jewish Congress#Organization and rela ...

. The journal publishes 12 issues a year.

History

''Information and Computation'' was founded as ''Information and Control'' in 1957 at the initiative of

Leon Brillouin Leon, Léon (French) or León (Spanish) may refer to: Places Europe * León, Spain, capital city of the Province of León * Province of León, Spain * Kingdom of León, an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula from 910 to 1230 and again fro ...

and under the editorship of Leon Brillouin,

Colin Cherry Edward Colin Cherry (23 June 1914 – 23 November 1979) was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically the cocktail party problem regarding the capacity to follow one conversatio ...

and

Peter Elias Peter Elias (November 23, 1923 – December 7, 2001) was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991. In 1955, Elias introdu ...

Murray Eden Murray Eden (August 17, 1920 – August 9, 2020), was an American physical chemist and academic. He was a professor in electrical engineering, a lecturer, a visiting professor and adjunct professor at institutions including at the Massachusetts ...

joined as editor in 1962 and became sole editor-in-chief in 1967. He was succeeded by

Albert R. Meyer Albert Ronald da Silva Meyer (born 1941) is Hitachi America Professor emeritus of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biography Meyer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1972 in applied mathematics, under t ...

in 1981, under whose editorship the journal was rebranded ''Information and Computation'' in 1987 in response to the shifted focus of the journal towards

theory of computation In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that deals with what problems can be solved on a model of computation, using an algorithm, how algorithmic efficiency, efficiently they can be solved or t ...

and away from

control theory Control theory is a field of mathematics that deals with the control of dynamical systems in engineered processes and machines. The objective is to develop a model or algorithm governing the application of system inputs to drive the system to a ...

. In 2020, Albert Mayer was succeeded by

as editor-in-chief of the journal.

Indexing

All articles from the ''Information and Computation'' journal can be viewed on indexing services like

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

and

Science Citation Index The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

. They are also reviewed cover-to-cover by the AMS Mathematical Reviews and

zbMATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastruct ...

and included in the computer science database

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collec ...

'', ''Information and Computation'' has a 2021

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 1.24.

Landmark publications

''On certain formal properties of grammars''

* Description: This article introduced what is now known as the

Chomsky hierarchy In formal language theory, computer science and linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy (also referred to as the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. This hierarchy of grammars was described by ...

, a

containment hierarchy A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...

of classes of

formal grammars In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe ...

that generate

formal languages In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of sy ...

''A formal theory of inductive inference''

* Description: This was the beginning of

algorithmic information theory Algorithmic information theory (AIT) is a branch of theoretical computer science that concerns itself with the relationship between computation and information of computably generated objects (as opposed to stochastically generated), such as str ...

and

Kolmogorov complexity In algorithmic information theory (a subfield of computer science and mathematics), the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produ ...

. Note that though

is named after

Andrey Kolmogorov Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov ( rus, Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ kəlmɐˈɡorəf, a=Ru-Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov.ogg, 25 April 1903 – 20 October 1987) was a Sovi ...

, he said that the seeds of that idea are due to

Ray Solomonoff Ray Solomonoff (July 25, 1926 – December 7, 2009) was the inventor of algorithmic probability, his General Theory of Inductive Inference (also known as Universal Inductive Inference),Samuel Rathmanner and Marcus Hutter. A philosophical treatise ...

contributed a lot to this area but in later articles.

''Fuzzy sets''

* Description: The seminal paper published in 1965 provides details on the mathematics of

fuzzy set In mathematics, fuzzy sets (a.k.a. uncertain sets) are sets whose elements have degrees of membership. Fuzzy sets were introduced independently by Lotfi A. Zadeh in 1965 as an extension of the classical notion of set. At the same time, defined ...

theory. , it is the most cited paper published in the journal.

''On the translation of languages from left to right''

* Description:

LR parser In computer science, LR parsers are a type of bottom-up parser that analyse deterministic context-free languages in linear time. There are several variants of LR parsers: SLR parsers, LALR parsers, Canonical LR(1) parsers, Minimal LR(1) parse ...

, which does bottom up parsing for

deterministic context-free languages In formal language theory, deterministic context-free languages (DCFL) are a proper subset of context-free languages. They are the context-free languages that can be accepted by a deterministic pushdown automaton. DCFLs are always unambiguous, mea ...

. Later derived parsers, such as the

LALR parser In computer science, an LALR parser or Look-Ahead LR parser is a simplified version of a canonical LR parser, to parse a text according to a set of production rules specified by a formal grammar for a computer language. ("LR" means left-to-rig ...

, have been and continue to be standard practice, such as in

Yacc Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a Look Ahead Left-to-Right Rightmost Derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a co ...

and descendants.

''Language identification in the limit''

* Description: This paper created

algorithmic learning theory Algorithmic learning theory is a mathematical framework for analyzing machine learning problems and algorithms. Synonyms include formal learning theory and algorithmic inductive inference. Algorithmic learning theory is different from statistica ...

. , it is the second most cited paper published in the journal.

''A Calculus of Mobile Processes, I''

* Description: This paper first introduced the

π-calculus In theoretical computer science, the -calculus (or pi-calculus) is a process calculus. The -calculus allows channel names to be communicated along the channels themselves, and in this way it is able to describe concurrent computations whose netw ...

. , it is the third most cited paper published in the journal and the most cited paper published since the journal assumed its current name.

References

External links

* {{Official website, 1=https://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-and-computation Computer science journals Elsevier academic journals Publications established in 1957