Announcements

The following is an interview with Dr. Luís Pinto-Coelho:

1. Congratulations on your published paper. Can you provide a background about yourself and what your research areas are?
I am a professor at ISEP - Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal. My primary research focuses on signal and image processing, supported by artificial intelligence approaches. Over the past 20 years, I have dedicated much of my work to speech processing, a field that holds special significance for me. Speech communication encompasses multiple layers of information and provides rich, complex signals, making it a fascinating and abundant source of data. Analyzing speech signals presents significant challenges, which serves as a strong motivator for my research. The potential to develop tools that enhance healthcare and improve patient outcomes is a powerful driving force in my work, which explains my dedication to bioengineering.

2. What made you decide to publish an article in Bioengineering?
MDPI has shown consistent growth in quality over the years, helping to create high quality journals such as Bioengineering. This journal has a very special scope, establishing bridges between healthcare and technology, which is not always easy to find. The journal is indexed with Scopus and has an interesting impact factor and quartile.

3. How was your experience publishing with Bioengineering?
Publishing with Bioengineering has been a positive experience. MDPI offers a very professional template which helps to guide manuscript writing while leading to robust articles. For math-intensive manuscripts, the availability of a LaTeX version is particularly valuable. After submission, reviewers’ feedback is fast and usually insightful. This is a very important aspect because technology is evolving very fast and researchers want to have their peers’ opinions, either to see the work published, improved, or rejected. Providing fast feedback is an ethical obligation for any journal that shows respect for the contributing authors, and Bioengineering meets this standard admirably. Overall, my experiences with Bioengineering have been consistently good, and I highly recommend it to other researchers.

4. Was it important to you that the journal is open access?
Publishing open access is the only logical way to go. The primary objective of writing papers is to communicate research findings to others, share results, and build networks, ultimately contributing to the creation of a vibrant collaborative community. Open access ensures that research is accessible to a wide audience without barriers, facilitating knowledge dissemination and collaboration. This approach aligns perfectly with the fundamental goal of academic publishing: to advance science and technology by making research available to everyone.

5. What do you hope that readers will get from your paper?
Human speech is an incredibly rich source of information, and the potential to automatically detect diseases using a low-cost, non-invasive approach is remarkable. This is particularly significant for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, for which no cure is currently known. In our paper, my team and I aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of technology in this field. We highlighted the most relevant datasets, the best-performing machine learning models, and the achievable results. We hope this paper will serve as a valuable resource for young researchers, enabling them to quickly develop robust systems and achieve competitive results. Additionally, we aim to give other researchers a clear understanding of the current landscape, helping them identify new research directions and opportunities.