Announcements

In order to reward the academic community, especially young researchers, and enhance communication among scientists, MDPI journals regularly offer various awards to researchers in specific fields, for example, Young Investigator Awards, Travel Awards, Best Paper Awards, and Best Poster Awards, etc. The awardees range from PhD students to junior scientists.

Currently, the following 44 awards given by MDPI journals are accepting applications. Please click on the award title below to check whether you are eligible for it and start the application process.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Andrea Prati has been appointed as Section Editor-in-Chief of “Computer Science and Electrical Engineering” in Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). His term started at the beginning of November 2017.

Andrea Prati graduated with honors in Computer Engineering in 1998 and received his PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2001. He was a visiting scholar for 9 months at the University of California, San Diego in 2001. From 2005 to 2011, he was a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In 2013, he was promoted to full professorship.

His research interests encompass different themes, from embedded devices for sensor networks in computer vision applications, to robotic vision, to multimedia, to performance analysis for multimedia computers. However, his main research activity is in video-surveillance topics: object tracking in distributed, multi-camera environments; analysis and removal of shadows; behavior analysis through trajectory classification. He recently started to research mobile vision, i.e., the application of sophisticated computer vision techniques on mobile phones.

He is the author of more than 150 papers, including 30 journals and five book chapters (list of publications can be found here. He has been an invited speaker and reviewer for many international journals. He is also Area Editor of Elsevier CVIU journal, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Eurasip JIVP, SPIE Optical Engineering and IOS Press JAISE. In 2017, he was appointed as Section Editor-in-Chief for the Section “Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering” for Applied Sciences.

He has also organized several Special Issues in international journals. He was the PC of ICIAP 2007. He was the PC of ACM/IEEE ICDSC in 2011, 2012, and 2013 and General Chair for the 2014 edition in Venice, Italy. He was also the local chair for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017, a leading conference in computer vision with more than 3200 attendees. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM and GIRPR, and fellow of IAPR.

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Andrea Prati as Section Editor-in-Chief and look forward to developing the Section “Computer Science and Electrical Engineering” under his leadership.

The Jussieu Call aims to develop and implement alternative models to meet the aims of open science while promoting bibliodiversity. In particular it wishes to promote new business models for funding open access publication. It was drafted on the Jussieu campus in Paris by a group of French researchers and scientific publishing professionals.

MDPI supports scholarly communities and initiatives that innovate and further promote Open Access publishing. There is a need to explore different frameworks to fund open access in ways that ensure that excessive funds are not diverted from research towards publishing. Many fair funding models already exist, and they can be further developed and extended. These include institutional support, library contributions or subsidies, premium services, participatory funding, etc. For this reason, MDPI has signed up to the Jussieu call and welcomes its aims.

More information can be found at http://jussieucall.org/ (archived here)

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s popular blog about topics in academic publishing, Scholarly Kitchen, recently interviewed MDPI’s CEO, Dr. Franck Vazquez. He shared some thoughts and information on the past and future of MDPI and open access publishing in general:

“In the long run, we aim to anchor MDPI in research communities. We recently developed and launched the preprint platform Preprints, revamped our free-to-use conference hosting platform Sciforum, and are working on other projects, such as Scilit, our bibliographic database.”

Read the full interview here.

We will be attending the MicroTAS 2017, a series of Conferences that are the premier forum for reporting research results in microfluidics, microfabrication, nanotechnology, integration, materials and surfaces, analysis and synthesis, and detection technologies for life science and chemistry. It will be held at the Savannah International Trade and Conference Center in Savannah, Georgia, USA from October 22–26, 2017, representing the following MDPI open access journals:

Micromachines
Sensors
Diagnostics
Biosensors
Technologies
Applied Sciences

Please visit our stand ((booth number: #6) to chat about our journals with our delegates. We look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.microtas2017.org.

Conference Location

Savannah International Trade & Convention Center
1 International Drive
Savannah, Georgia 31402
USA

Once over 10 papers are received for this Special Issue, one of the published papers will be selected to receive a SI Best Paper Award by an Evaluation Committee.

Criteria:

From papers submitted to this Special Issue, the award nominees will be assessed on their originality, quality, and contribution to the field.

Award:

A SI Best paper Award consisting of 300 CHF, a certificate and the opportunity to publish one’s next submission free of charge in Applied Sciences will be given to the authors of the winning best paper of the Special Issue.

We will be attending the 2017 MRS Fall Meeting which will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from November 26–December 1, 2017, and representing the following open access journals:

Materials
Nanomaterials
Energies
Metals
Applied Sciences
Crystals
Minerals
Journal of Functional Biomaterials
Coatings
Robotics
Biosensors
Chemosensors
Polymers
Bioengineering

Please come along to our booth (booth number: #122) to chat with our delegates about our journals and hear about our travel awards offered to Postdocs and PhD students. Our delegates will also answer any questions about online publishing and our journals. We look forward to meeting you in person in Boston!

For more information on the conference, please visit:
www.mrs.org/fall2017

We are delighted to have welcomed 24 new participants to our Institutional Open Access Programme (IOAP) since the beginning of September this year. These are University libraries and Research Institutions located around the world; from the USA and Canada to the UK, and from Norway and Spain to Greece. Well respected Universities, such as the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Arizona in the US, have signed up, while their researchers can now benefit from a 10% discount on the Article Processing Charges (APC) for any papers they publish in MDPI journals, at no cost for the library or the University.

We are more than happy to see the Open Access movement growing stronger and wider every day and we appreciate the vital role which librarians, repository managers, and other scholarly communications professionals play in the field. Our communication with and service to this community is, therefore, one of our principal priorities. The IOAP is our way to support academic and scientific Institutions as well as their scholars in managing, administrating, and publishing research in an Open Access world.

The IOAP set of free services, provided by MDPI to institutions that sign up, include:

• No fee for participants and no obligation to prolong after the initial 12 months. The participants may withdraw from the programme at any time, and we will also keep it free for the library for as long as they continue in the programme.
• Authors affiliated with the university will receive a discount on the article processing charge (APC).
• The institution is granted free access to the MDPI submission system and can receive free alerts of new submissions to our journals.
• By default, authors from the institution will continue to be invoiced directly unless the institution opts for central billing.
• Auto-archiving of papers into the institutions´ repository as long as it supports SWORD 1.3.

More details about the programme and a list of our current participant institutions can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap

Institutions which are interested to participate may do so online at: https://www.mdpi.com/ioap-form

 The full list of the Institutions that signed up in September is as follows:

1. University of Denver, USA
2. University of Colorado Boulder, USA
3. University of Arizona, USA
4. Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Middlebury College, USA
6. Touro College, USA
7. University of New Orleans, USA
8. University of Leicester, UK
9. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
10. University of Strathclyde, UK
11. Cranfield University, UK
12. Hope College, USA
13. Oregon State University, USA
14. Drew University, USA
15. Swansea University, UK
16. University of South Florida, USA
17. University of Georgia, USA
18. Arizona State University, USA
19. University of Southern Mississippi, USA
20. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
21. Grinnell College, USA
22. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
23. University of Patras, Greece
24. Public University of Navarre, Spain

Congratulations to the authors Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez from Universidad de Malaga, Spain, Victor Hernandez-Bennets, Han Fan and Achim Lilienthal from Örebro University, Sweden for publishing the 100,000th peer-reviewed article.

The article is published in the Chemical Sensors section of Sensors.

GADEN: A 3D Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments

Evermore pressing environmental concerns have led global actors and decision-makers to search for stricter emission monitoring approaches. As part of novel monitoring systems, robots with gas and environmental sensors are a promising solution. However, validation of such robotic inspectors is expensive, time consuming, and plagued by repeatability issues. In this article, we present GADEN (the short form for Gas Dispersion Simulator for Mobile Robot Olfaction in Realistic Environments), which combines gas dispersion and robotics simulation in a common framework. Developed under the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS), GADEN enables validation of sensing strategies with gas dispersion being simulated using computational fluid dynamics and filament dispersion theory. GADEN allows simulating complex, realistic, 3D environments for reproducible testing of robotic gas sensing algorithms. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that GADEN is a versatile and user-friendly evaluation tool and emphasize its enormous potential for the mobile robot olfaction community.

Read the full article here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/7/1479/htm

Evolution of Impact Factor, Citations and Publications for Applied Sciences: