Intelligent Decision Technologies 15 (2021) 1–3 1 DOI 10.3233/IDT-219001 IOS Press 15 years of the International Journal of Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT): Reﬂection from the Editors Gloria Phillips-Wren, George A. Tsihrintzis, Lakhmi C. Jain and Junzo Watada Background The inspiration for IDT grew out of conversations between Professor/Dr. Gloria Phillips-Wren and Pro- fessor/Dr. Lakhmi Jain at the Knowledge Engineer- ing Systems (KES) International annual conferences. The mission of KES is stated as “dissemination, trans- fer, sharing and brokerage of knowledge” to address knowledge-intensive subjects. As a large professional scientiﬁc community, KES sponsors a broad spectrum of publications and activities for research scientists, academics, engineers and practitioners. Research in in- telligent agents and intelligent systems in the timeframe of 2004–2006 at KES conferences was focused on al- gorithms and technical speciﬁcations. During the same general time period, the technology was becoming ma- ture enough to be implemented into real-world deci- sion support systems (DSS) for previously intractable problems. Thus, the idea emerged to create a special focus in KES that blended these two areas of technical aspects of intelligent systems and decision support through both a new journal and an annual conference. This ultimately resulted in a proposal for an interdisciplinary research journal that focused on supporting and advancing hu- man decision making though the use of intelligent tech- nologies. The journal was envisioned as bridging com- puter science with its development of artiﬁcial intelli- gence and intelligent agents, information systems with its development of decision support applications, and engineering with its development of systems. The growth of the internet with its concomitant avail- ability of data exploded the amount and types of infor- mation that must be considered by a decision maker. Decisions must often be made in real-time under uncer- tain, stressful conditions that may change rapidly. Syn- ergies between intelligent and information technolo- gies can, for example, deliver artiﬁcial intelligence to enhance human judgment, perceive anomalies in data, enable collaboration, speed processing of new infor- mation, assist in risk assessment, identify and retrieve needed knowledge, suggest alternatives to the decision maker, and automate some decisional tasks. Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT): An Inter- national Journal is dedicated to advancing knowledge in the theory and application of intelligent technolo- gies and systems that support decision making. The ﬁeld of intelligent decision support has continued to expand rapidly and reach real systems due, in part, to advances in enabling technologies. Advances and efﬁ- ciencies in Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI), internet speeds, real-time data acquisition such as the Internet of Things (IoT), distributed data storage, data processing via clus- ter computing and virtualization, and network-centric environments such as cloud technologies can deliver intelligent systems at scale in real-time. Since many ap- plications involve some type of decision, IDT provides a forum for original research that has the potential to improve decision making using intelligent technologies. IDT joined the ﬂagship KES Journal as an ofﬁcial journal of KES a couple of years after its successful launch. IDT is also an annual conference series under the KES umbrella of Smart Digital Futures. Advisory Board, Authors, Reviewers, Special Issue Editors We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Advisory Board, authors, reviewers and special ISSN 1872-4981/$35.00 c  2021 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved