Special Issue "Concepts of Entropy and Their Applications"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Philip Broadbridge
Head, School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, La Trobe University Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia
Website: http://www.findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/researcher/person130135.html
E-Mail: p.broadbridge@latrobe.edu.au
Phone: +61 (0)3 8344 1779
Fax: +1 (0)3 9349 4106
Interests: concepts of entropy and their applications

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Tony Guttmann
The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010
Website: http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~tonyg/
E-Mail: tony.guttmann@gmail.com

Dear Colleagues,

The original papers in this special issue arose from a meeting of the AMSI-MASCOS Theme Program, Concepts of Entropy and their Applications, which took place at Melbourne Australia, November - December, 2007. During the four years that have elapsed since that meeting, research on this topic has progressed significantly.

Although there are various concepts of entropy, they provide unifying insights in a wide variety of both topics and scale. Topics include information theory, forecasting, optimization, irreversible processes, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, while the scale ranges from the atomic, through the macroscopic to the cosmological.

We feel that it is a good time to call for new contributions from all potential authors. We hope that some of the original authors who had an association with the theme program will provide updates on progress. Other readers of the original issue may be stimulated to provide complementary or supporting material of their own. Finally we welcome new authors who believe that their own work relates well to the overall theme.

Prof. Dr. Philip Broadbridge
Prof. Dr. Tony Guttmann
Guest Editors

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs).

• Clausius entropy
• Gibbs entropy
• Boltzmann entropy
• von Neumann entropy
• Tsallis entropy
• entropy and information theory
• black hole entropy
• entropy in environmental modelling

Type of paper: Review
Title: A Review on Permutation Entropy and Its Main Applications to Econophysics and Neural Systems
Authors: M. Zanin, O. A. Rosso, L. Zunino, D. Papo
Affiliation: Center for Biomedical Technology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Montegancedo, 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain; E-Mail: massimiliano.zanin@ctb.upm.es
Abstract: Entropy is a powerful tool for the analysis of time series, as it allows describing the probability distributions of the possible state of a system, and therefore the information encoded in it. Nevertheless, important information may be codified also in the temporal dynamics, an aspect which is not usually taken into account. The idea of calculating entropy based on permutation patterns [C. Bandt, B. Pompe, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 174102], that is, permutations defined by the order relations among values of a time series, has received a lot of attention in the last years, especially for the understanding of complex and chaotic systems. Permutation entropy directly accounts for the temporal information contained in the time series; furthermore, it has the quality of simplicity, robustness and very low computational cost. In this review, the theoretical foundations of the permutation entropy will be analyzed, as well as the main recent applications to the analysis of economical markets and to the understanding of neural systems.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Curvature Entropy for Curved Profile Generation
Authors: Yoshiki Ujiie, Takeo Kato, Koichiro Sato and Yoshiyuki Matsuoka
Affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Keio University, 3-14-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, 223-8522, Japan; E-Mails: Koichiro_Sato@a3.keio.jp (K.S.), kato@mech.keio.ac.jp (T.K.)
Abstract: In a curved surface design, the overall shape features that emerge from combinations of shape elements are important. However, controlling the features of the overall shape in curved profiles is difficult using conventional microscopic shape information such as dimension. Herein two types of macroscopic shape information, curvature entropy and quadrature curvature entropy, quantitatively represent the features of the overall shape. The curvature entropy is calculated by the curvature distribution, and represents the complexity of a shape (one of the overall shape features). The quadrature curvature entropy is an improvement of the curvature entropy by introducing a Markov process to evaluate the continuity of a curve and to approximate human cognition of the shape. Additionally, a shape generation method using a genetic algorithm as a calculator and the entropy as a shape generation index is presented. Finally, the applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated using the side view of an automobile as a design example.
Keywords: curve; information theory; shape generation