Foreword

Abstract

The information and systems society (ISS) of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) publishes the Japanese-edition Transactions as well as the English edition. Whereas valuable papers are presented in the Japanese edition, these papers do not reach a wide audience in the world. Among all of such valuable papers, we selected those each of which won the excellent paper award recently for publishing this special section called "special section on award-winning papers". All papers have been extended from their previous versions published in the Japanese edition so that their state-ofthe-arts are introduced. Since the transactions of the IEICE-ISS are open-access journal since Jan., 2017, I hope that all papers included in this special section will reach a number of researchers and engineers in the world and help them to improve their research and development activities. On behalf of the guest editorial committee of this special section, I would like to express our appreciation to all of the authors for submitting their excellent papers. I would also like to thank the editorial committee members and all the reviewers for their contributions and outstanding comments during the reviewing process.