Announcements

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Outstanding Reviewer Awards, sponsored by MDPI and Entropy. The awards were granted to five outstanding scholars who have great review experience. The prize will be 500 CHF plus a 50% discount on the publication fee of one paper in 2021.

The awards winners are:

Dr. Domenico Ciuonzo
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

Dr. Soheil Keshmiri
The Thomas N. Sato BioMEC-X Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan

Dr. Chih-Yuan Tseng
Computational Group, Sinoveda Canda Inc, Edmonton, Canada

Prof. Dr. Dragana Bajic
Faculty of Technical Sciences, Department of Communications and Signal Processing, University of Novi Sad, Belgrade, Serbia

Dr. Victor Hugo Rangel-Hernandez
Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Guanajuato, Salamanca, Mexico

It was difficult to select the five winnners, as there are lots of reviewers helping us check the manuscripts. We do appreciate every reviewer’s work, which facilitates the review process and controls the quality of manuscripts.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020–2021 Travel Awards, sponsored by MDPI and Entropy. The awards were granted to two outstanding young researchers working in the thematic areas:

Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Black Holes

Quantum Information

Selecting the two winners was a difficult decision, as we received many high-quality applications from around the world. We thank all applicants as we look forward to receiving more applications for the Entropy 2022 Travel Awards.

For more information about Entropy awards, please see the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/awards

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

Citations of papers published in the journal Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300) are now indexed and can be searched for in PubMed starting from Vol. 20 (2018). Further, the full-text versions of these papers are archived in PubMed Central.

PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations of biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals in PubMed Central, and online books. It is a free resource developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Lamberto Rondoni has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the new section “Non-Equilibrium Phenomena” in Entropy.

Lamberto Rondoni is a full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy and holds secondary appointments at Università di Torino and INFN (Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics). He works in statistical physics, particularly on the subjects of fluctuations at the nanoscale and general non-equilibrium systems. Statistical mechanics aims at describing the physical properties of a macroscopic system on the basis of the behavior of its microscopic constituents [1]. The most developed part of statistical physics concerns equilibrium situations, but the majority of assumptions employed for systems at equilibrium have limited application for out of equilibrium phenomena, and dedicated tools are required. Recent efforts led by a number of scientists including Lamberto Rondoni have unveiled exciting new and rigorous results, which are collectively known as fluctuation relations [2–5]. These represent one of the few general, accurate descriptions achieved so far in non-equilibrium systems, covering a wide variety of phenomena and observables. Furthermore, these developments have led to numerous results concerning the response of the widest class of systems to perturbations. Currently, research in this field is of particular interest in bio- and nanosciences and technology, as well as in soft sciences (socio-economic, media and communications, etc.) in which the notion of proper equilibrium cannot be established and in which stationary states are characterized by large fluctuations.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Lamberto Rondoni as the Editor-in-Chief of the section “Non-Equilibrium Phenomena”, and we look forward to Entropy achieving many milestones under his leadership. For further information on the journal section, please click:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/sections/non-equilibrium_phenomena

References

1. Chandler, D.W. Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1987.
2. Evans, D.J.; Searles, D.J. The fluctuation theorem. Adv. Phys. 2002, 51, 1529–1585.
3. Gallavotti, G.; Cohen, E.G.D. Dynamical ensembles in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. Phys. Rev. Lett. 1995, 74, 2694–2697.
4. Jarzynski, C. Nonequilibrium equality for free energy differences. Phys. Rev. Lett. 1997, 78, 2690–2693.
5. Marconi, U.M.B.; Puglisi, A.; Rondoni, L.; Vulpiani, A. Fluctuation-dissipation: Response theory in statistical physics. Phys. Rep. 2008, 461, 111–195.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the Best Poster Award, sponsored by Entropy for 45th Conference of the Middle European Cooperation in Statistical Physics (MECO45), held on 14–16 September 2020.

“Phase transitions in three-dimensional random anisotropy Heisenberg model: two case studies” by Maxym Dudka, Yurij Holovatch and Juan J. Ruiz-Lorenzo

The poster created by Maxym Dudka, Yurij Holovatch (Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, Lviv, Ukraine) and Juan J. Ruiz-Lorenzo (Extremadura University, Badajoz, Spain) concerns the study of ordering in random anisotropy magnets. Such magnets constitute a wide class of magnetic systems, with structural disorder described by a random anisotropy model that was introduced in the early 1970s by Harris, Plischke and Zuckermann. Despite extensive studies, the problem of the nature of a low-temperature phase of random anisotropy systems remains a very intriguing issue. While, for large values of local anisotropy strength, the majority of studies predict spin-glass, there is much discussion about ordering for small and moderate values of such strength. It appears that the answer to this question depends also on the local axis distribution. Analytical and numerical approaches predict an absence of the ferromagnetic order for uniform continuous distribution while preserving long-range order for discrete distribution, except in the numerical study, where second-order phase transition to long-range order was claimed for both kinds of distributions with the same correlation length critical exponent. We study phase transitions in the three-dimensional random anisotropy model with three-component order parameter by means of extensive Monte Carlo simulations, using the parallel tempering method for two different random anisotropy axis distributions and two different values of local anisotropy strength for each disorder distribution case. We observe clear signatures of the second order phase transition (paramagnetic–ferromagnetic) for both distributions, although extracted critical exponents support different collective behaviors for different random anisotropy axis distributions. Moreover, while we find strong evidence of universality for the case of the discrete disorder distribution, results for the uniform case do not present universality, showing the dependence of the critical exponents on the disorder strength, as well as on the lattice size, therefore questioning the nature of low-temperature state in the thermodynamic limit. The work was initiated within the FP7-PEOPLE, IRSES project SPIDER. Maxym Dudka acknowledges the financial support of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) on the final stage of the project.

Entropy is offering three travel awards to sponsor PhD students to attend a relevant conference of their choice in 2020 or 2021. The three thematic areas for the three travel awards are:

Quantum Information

Entropy and Biology

Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Black Holes

The deadline for the Entropy 2020–2021 Travel Awards has been extended! You can apply for one of the awards by 1 November 2020. The winners will be announced on the Entropy website by 30 November 2020. For full details and how to apply, please click here.

Please note that applicants should select only one Entropy Travel Award when applying. Applicants selecting more than one award will automatically be disqualified from all awards. The chosen travel award should match the field and thematic area of their research and planned presentation.

We are pleased to announce the two winners of the Best ECR Presentation Awards sponsored by Entropy for the CNS*2020 Online Workshop on Methods of Information Theory in Computational Neuroscience held on 21–22 July 2020.

“A Differentiable Measure of Pointwise Shared Information” by Abdullah Makkeh

Partial information decomposition (PID) of the multivariate mutual information describes the distinct ways in which a set of source variables contains information about a target variable. The groundbreaking work of Williams and Beer has shown that this decomposition cannot be determined from classic information theory without making additional assumptions, and several candidate measures have been proposed, often drawing on principles from related fields such as decision theory. None of these measures is differentiable with respect to the underlying probability mass function. Here, we present a novel measure that draws only on the principle linking the local mutual information to exclusion of probability mass. This principle is foundational to the original definition of the mutual information by Fano. We reuse this principle to define a measure of shared information based on the shared exclusion of probability mass by the realizations of source variables. Our measure is differentiable and well defined for individual realizations of the random variables. Thus, it lends itself, for example, to local learning in artificial neural networks. We show that the measure can be interpreted as local mutual information with the help of an auxiliary variable. We also show that it has a meaningful Möbius inversion on a redundancy lattice and obeys a target chain rule. We provide an operational interpretation of the measure based on the decisions that an agent should take if only given the shared information.

“Multi-Target Information Decomposition and Applications to Integrated Information Theory” by Pedro Mediano

The partial information decomposition (PID) framework allows us to decompose the information that multiple source variables have about a single target variable. In its 10 years of existence, PID has spawned numerous theoretical and practical tools to help us understand and analyze information processing in complex systems. However, the asymmetric role of sources and targets in PID hinders its application in certain contexts, like studying information sharing in multiple processes evolving jointly over time. In this work, we developed a novel extension of the PID framework to the multi-target setting, which lends itself more naturally to the analysis of multivariate dynamical systems. This new decomposition is tightly linked with integrated information theory and gives us new analysis tools as well as a richer understanding of information processing in multivariate dynamical systems. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02297.