Explainable Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Applications, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to address one of the most critical challenges in artificial intelligence: making AI systems transparent, interpretable, and trustworthy for researchers, developers, and end-users. By elucidating the internal reasoning processes of AI models, XAI can enhance user trust and improve the reliability of automated decision-making systems.

This Special Issue welcomes the submission of high-quality, original research and review articles exploring the application and emerging frontiers of XAI. In addition to the application of conventional XAI methods, we also encourage submissions exploring biologically inspired, cognitively motivated, and neuroscience-related XAI methods.

We invite studies covering theoretical foundations, algorithmic innovations, practical applications in various domains, and empirical evaluations of XAI methods. Relevant application areas include, but are not limited to, biomedical signal processing, computer vision, natural‑language processing, robotics, autonomous vehicles, recommender systems, trustworthy big‑data analytics, edge/IoT devices, finance, and cognitive sciences.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Domain‑specific applications of XAI in health care, autonomous systems, smart manufacturing, finance, cybersecurity, and environmental science;
2. Cognitive science and biologically inspired XAI methods;
3. Hardware‑efficient and real‑time XAI on edge, mobile, FPGA, or neuromorphic platforms;
4. Causal, counterfactual, and contrastive explanation frameworks;
5. XAI for privacy preservation, fairness auditing, and responsible AI governance;
6. Benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and open‑source toolkits for XAI;
7. Human–AI interaction studies evaluating explanatory effectiveness.

Dr. Guoyang Liu
Prof. Dr. Weidong Zhou
Prof. Dr. Lan Tian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.