Dear Readers, 

I would like to wish you all the best for the new year! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to our first regular issue in 2024, which is already the 30th year that J.UCS has been available to authors and readers without any interruptions. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the visionary ideas of Prof. Hermann Maurer, who founded the journal and ran it successfully for many years, preparing the ground for it to become one of the longest-running open content journals in computer science. 

Looking back on the past year, we have further increased our visibility and taken steps to fully comply with the Diamond Open Content Standard and prepare to join the KOALA initiative. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Pensoft team and the J.UCS publishing team, we are listed and indexed in more than 40 indexing services worldwide, including DOAJ, Web of Science, and Scopus. The increased visibility and social media presence have also led to a further increase in page views and article downloads. With around 100,000 unique views, interest has doubled compared to the previous year. We can also look back on an increasing number of submitted articles and special issue proposals. We are also very pleased to report that the journal's Impact Factor has stabilised at a high level with a Web of Science Impact Factor of 1.0 and a Scopus Science Score of 2.7. We proudly look back on a total of 12 issues - 11 regular and 1 special issue - with 63 articles by 231 authors from 40 countries on new aspects of various computer science topics. The acceptance rate has fallen to below 15 per cent. 

These great achievements were only possible thanks to the commitment and interest of the community and the valuable support of the Editorial Board and the J.UCS Consortium members. In 2023, we welcomed 10 new members to the Editorial Board, bringing our total number of Editorial Board members to 196. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the support of 67 guest reviewers over the past year.  

In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Ulrike Krießmann from the Library of the Graz University of Technology, Prof. Klaus Tochtermann from the ZBW, Prof. Christian Eckhardt from California Polytechnic State University, Prof. Krzysztof Pietroszek from the American University in Washington DC, and Prof. Muhammad Tanvir Afzal from Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University in Islamabad in Pakistan for their generous support in offering an open content journal without charging the authors for their articles. Unfortunately, some partners are withdrawing their support for 2024 due to financial restrictions, but we are very happy to welcome the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and are very grateful for their support. 

I would also like to thank the J.UCS team, Johanna Zeisberg for taking care of the publication process, Aleksandar Bobic and David Kerschbaumer for their social media support, and Alexander Nussbaumer for his technical support, as well as Pensoft Publishers Ltd. for hosting our journal. 

I look forward to continuing to work with our editors, editorial team and technical support to maintain the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we can improve and develop J.UCS in the future. We also greatly appreciate the generous support of the J.UCS community, especially in promoting the journal and citing relevant articles in their research papers. 

In this regular issue, I am very pleased to present 6 accepted articles by 21 authors from 6 different countries, namely Brazil, Cuba, France, Malaysia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. 

In a collaborative effort between researchers from Spain and the UK, Bashar Alshouha, Jesus Serrano-Guerrero, David Elizondo, Francisco P. Romero and Jose A. Olivas look into consumer attitudes towards healthcare services by applying a transfer learning approach to detect emotions from consumer feedback. In the second article, Ana Díaz Muñoz, Moisés Rodríguez Monje, and Mario Gerardo Piattini Velthuis from Spain address the design of an environment to measure quality metrics for hybrid, classic-quantum software, propose a set of new measurements for hybrid maintainability, and develop a first prototype as a SonarQube plugin that is capable of measuring these metrics. In a research collaboration between the UK, Malaysia and France, Ngo Le Huy Hien, Ah-Lian Kor, Mei Choo Ang, Eric Rondeau, and Jean-Philippe Georges cover findings on image filtering techniques for object recognition in autonomous vehicles based on the evaluation of 5 different deep learning models, YOLOv5s, EfficientNet-B7, Xception, MobilenetV3, and InceptionV4, and Hessian, Laplacian, and Hessian-based Ridge Detection filtering techniques. Francisco Iniesto and Covadonga Rodrigo from Spain look into the evaluation of MOOC accessibility as students’ experience by applying web content accessibility guidelines and an automatic tool, and investigate students’ perceptions and comparison of the two approaches. Yilena Pérez-Almaguer, Edianny Carballo-Cruz, Yailé Caballero-Mota, and Raciel Year from Cuba explore content-based group recommendations for suggesting restaurants in Havana City enhanced by extended restaurant features, virtual group profiles, and the selection of the most appropriate aggregation approach for composing group recommendations. Last but not least, Raimundo Osvaldo Vieira and Helyane Bronoski Borges from Brazil cover a systematic mapping study on dimensionality reduction for hierarchical multi-label classification. 

Enjoy Reading! 

Cordially, 

Christian Gütl, Managing Editor-in-Chief

Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria