We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Stefanos Kollias has been appointed Section Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Electronic Multimedia” in Electronics (ISSN: 2079-9292).

Prof. Dr. Stefanos Kollias is a professor at the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, as well as Founding Professor of machine learning in the School of Computer Science in the University of Lincoln, UK. He is an IEEE Fellow with world-leading research experience in machine/deep learning and applications. He has published 300 papers in international journals and conferences, with 14500 citations (h-index: 58) in Google Scholar. He has supervised 50 Ph.D. students, half of which are academics in Europe and the USA. He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the European Neural Network Society and the European Commission Expert Group on AI for Cultural Heritage, as well as Chairman of the Board of the Greek National Infrastructures for Research & Technology. He has led his group in 100 European R&D projects, with EUR 20 million of funding.

His research interests cover machine and deep learning, trustworthy artificial intelligence, large-scale multimodal models, data analysis, search, retrieval and recognition, as well as applications in computer vision, personalized healthcare and medical imaging, human–computer interaction, cultural heritage, agri-food, industrial monitoring and anomaly prediction.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Stefanos Kollias, who shared his vision for the journal as well as his views on the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role as its Section Editor-in-Chief?
During the last few years, I have served as an Editor of MDPI’s journal Electronics and have appreciated the great interest of researchers, especially young ones in their early careers, as well as those who are more experienced, in submitting and publishing their work in the journal. Submitted papers have been tackling a large variety of significant and state-of-the-art research problems. In this way, Electronics is at the heart of the dynamically evolving research fields related to transferring from Industry 4.0 to Society 5.0. As Section Editor-in-Chief of Electronics, I will do my best to assist the continuous effort of the journal to achieve excellence along this journey.

2. What is your vision for the Section “Electronic Multimedia”?
The Section “Electronic Multimedia” reveals the underlying technological areas of interest, spanning areas from classical electronics to multimedia and multimodal data analysis. My vision is to expand these so as to cover the whole interaction between physical space and cyberspace, with the target of improving people’s well-being.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
Multimodal data are collected in the physical space by sensors and devices and are accumulated in cyberspace, where technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are used to analyze the data, make meaningful decisions, and provide effective services to citizens and businesses. These are implemented by machines and robots, enhanced with VR and AR technologies, and materialized by systems such as 3D printers.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
The development of open access in publishing can greatly assist the ability of researchers, policy makers, practitioners, clinicians, and the general public to search, find, read and use new knowledge and research outputs. Sharing this knowledge can boost its impact and facilitate the generation of new developments, tools, and products for the good of the people.

5. Do you have any valuable suggestions you would like to share with young students and early-career researchers?
My suggestion to them is to think of new ideas, analyze them in depth, evaluate them and use open access journals such as Electronics to get feedback and reviews in a short time, so as to form the basis for moving ahead in further research and developments.

We wish Prof. Dr. Stefanos Kollias every success in his position as Section Editor-in-Chief, and we look forward to his future contributions to the journal.