Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the following 17 recognized scholars have recently joined the Editorial Board of Entropy (ISSN: 1099-4300):

Further details about the Editorial Board can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/editors.

Entropy has launched a new project—Video Exhibition—for authors that have papers published in Entropy. Authors can apply to exhibit a video abstract to briefly introduce their published research. That will help the paper make a bigger impact, potentially attract more citations, and further establish authors’ reputation.

Website Link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/exhibition.

To submit the video abstract, please click “Submit Your Video” on the website. Below is an introduction of the Video Abstract (VA):

A video abstract is an increasingly popular way of getting others to engage with published research, increasing the visibility of articles. It can be 2–5 minutes long, summing up what has been accomplished and documented in your paper and, crucially, why it is important for the community. One can use video abstracts to illustrate concepts explained in the article, to introduce viewers to the equipment and tools that have been used in the research, and engage with the audience in a more informal manner. It could be a video recorded by using the "record slide" function in PowerPoint, and then saved as one of the following file types: MPEG-4 Video (*.mp4), WMV，AVI，MOV，3GP，or MPEG, depending on which is the most convenient for you.

Below are some basic technical guidelines and requirements for the video abstract:

1. Maximum size: 200 MB;
2. Title (it will be displayed to the public);
3. Cover image (jgeg, png): minimum size: 250px*166px;
4. Copyright holder: Please state who owns the copyright of your items.

If you are interested in the exhibition, please do not hesitate to share your video abstract with us. Alternatively, you could send the video abstract to entropy-marketing@mdpi.com and we will put it online.

This serves to announce to our valued authors based in Japan that value-added tax, or consumption tax will now be imposed on article processing fees and other service fees for all papers submitted, or resubmitted (assigned new paper IDs), effective from 15 August 2021. The change is in accordance with the Japanese "Act for Partial Revision of the Income Tax Act and Other Acts" (Act No. 9 of 2015), which includes a revision of consumption taxation on cross-border supplies of services such as digital content distribution.

For additional information from the National Tax Agency please see here ("Cross-border supplies of electronic services").

Contact: Setsuko Nishihara, MDPI Tokyo

We are pleased to announce the winner of the “Best Poster Award” sponsored by Entropy for the 11th Polish Symposium on Physics in Economy and Social Sciences (FENS2021) held on 1–3 July 2021.

• “Multibranch Multifractality and the Phase Transitions in the Trading Activity”
  by Jaroslaw Klamut, Ryszard Kutner, Tomasz Gubiec and Zbigniew R. Struzik

Empirical time series of inter-event or waiting times were investigated using a modified multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis operating on fluctuations of mean detrended dynamics. At the core of the extended multifractal analysis was the non-monotonic behavior of the generalized Hurst exponent h(q)—the fundamental exponent in the study of multifractals. The consequence of this behavior is the non-monotonic behavior of the coarse Hölder exponent α(q) leading to the multi-branchedness of the spectrum of dimensions. The Legendre–Fenchel transform was used instead of the routinely used canonical Legendre (single-branched) contact transform. The thermodynamic consequences of the multi-branched multifractality were revealed. The results were presented for the high-frequency data of the Polish stock market (Warsaw Stock Exchange) for intertrade times for KGHM—one of the most liquid stocks contained therein.

We are pleased to report that the 2020 Impact Factor of Entropy increased to 2.524 in the recent release of the Journal Citation Reports®, representing the 6th consecutive year of continuous growth. Entropy now ranks 37/85 (Q2) in the “Physics, Multidisciplinary” category.

Source: Data according to Journal Citation Reports®, 2020 release, a Clarivate Analytics product.

The 2020 citation metrics have been officially released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)!

We are pleased to announce that 85 MDPI journals are included, of which:

• 10 journals received their first impact factor
• 96% of journals increased their impact factor from 2019
• 32 journals (38%) ranked among the top 25% of journals, in at least one category

* Journals given their first Impact Factor in 2021

Source: 2020 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports ® (Clarivate, 2021)

We are pleased to announce that Entropy received an increased CiteScore of 4.0 in the latest released 2020 CiteScore™ values, published by Elsevier in June 2021. Entropy now ranks 8/67 (Q1) in “Mathematical Physics”, 15/58 (Q2) in “Physics and Astronomy”, 228/693 (Q2) in “Electrical and Electronic Engineering”, and 110/329 (Q2) in “Information Systems”. For full details of the current CiteScore release, please see the journal's Source profile: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/13715.

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to all of the authors, reviewers, and editors who have contributed to the journal and enabled this next big step!

We are pleased to announce that the Outstanding Paper Award, sponsored by Entropy (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy), for the 4th Workshop Quantum Contextuality in Quantum Mechanics and Beyond (QCQMB) was granted to Daphne Wang at University College London. Congratulations!

• “In Search of True Contextuality in Natural Language” by Daphne Wang (joint work with Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Samson Abramsky and Victor Cervantes)

Motivated by ideas of Firth and Harris, computational linguists argue that if two words often occur in the same context, they have similar meanings. Despite the successes of this idea in disambiguation tasks in NLP [1], the systematic existence of ambiguity in natural language and its shades and nuances are not challenges faced head on. Contextuality and its degrees are well studied topics in Quantum Mechanics. Here, the mathematical framework of Contextuality-by-Default (CbD) has become a useful tool when dealing with systems that are signalling and will also be convenient for natural language. Our line of research comes closest to the concept combination examples of [2]. However, as shown in [3], neither of the 23 examples of [2] are truly contextual. In our work, we did find combinations that are truly contextual for the first time. These are from a dataset of rank-2 cyclic (verb, noun) phrases constructed from [4,5], and the probabilities are tabulated from occurrences in corpora (BNC and uKWaC). More general types of systems were considered too, initially using the sheaf-theoretic approach to contextuality, but we showed that none of them are truly contextual. For our rank-2 cyclic dataset, we made use of the degrees of signalling and direct influence from M-Contextuality to find quantitative empirical evidence that the context affects ambiguous senses and meanings of nouns and verbs differently. So far, contextuality has not been found in more general systems, although nothing seems to preclude the existence of contextual examples in certain types of models.

[1] H. Schutze. Automatic Word Sense Discrimination. Computational Linguistics, 24(1): 97-123, 199

[2] P. D. Bruza, K. Kitto, B. J. Ramm, L. Sitbon. A Probabilistic Framework for Analysing the Compositionality of Conceptual Combinations. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 67: 26-38, 2015.

[3] E. Dzhafarov, R. Zhang, V. Cervantes, J. Kujala. On Contextuality in Behavioral Data. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 374, 08 2015.

[4] M Pickering, S. Frisson. Processing Ambiguous Verbs: Evidence from Eye Movements, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27:556--73, 2001.

[5] M.K. Tanenhaus, J.M. Leiman, M.S. Seidenberg. Evidence for Multiple Stages in the Processing of Ambiguous Words in Syntactic Contexts, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18(4):427-440, 1979.

We are pleased to announce that the Best Presentation Award sponsored by Entropy for 6th Quantum Information in Spain (ICE6) conference was granted to Dr. Ignacio Gimeno at University of Zaragoza. Congratulations!

• “Broad-Band Spectroscopy of Electronuclear Spin Qudits Based on Vanadyl Porphyrin Molecules” by Dr. Ignacio Gimeno

The possibility of encoding more than a qubit in vanadyl porphyrin molecules hosting a S = 1/2 electronic spin coupled to a I = 7/2 nuclear spin has been explored. A complete study of the spin Hamiltonian and its parameters, as well as the spin dynamics, has been performed via a combination of electron paramagnetic resonance, heat capacity, magnetization and on-chip magnetic spectroscopy experiments performed on single crystals, observing low temperature spin coherence times of micro-seconds and spin relaxation times longer than a second. For sufficiently strong magnetic fields (B > 0.1 T, corresponding to resonance frequencies of 9–10 GHz), these properties make vanadyl porphyrin molecules suitable qubit realizations. The presence of multiple equispaced nuclear spin levels, then, merely provides eight alternatives to define the ‘1’ and ‘0’ basis states. For lower magnetic fields (B < 0.1 T) and lower frequencies (< 2 GHz), spectroscopic signatures of a sizeable electronuclear entanglement arise. This effect generates a larger set of allowed transitions between different electronuclear spin states and removes their degeneracies. Under these conditions, it can be shown that each molecule fulfils the conditions to act as a universal 4-qubit processor or, equivalently, as a d = 16 qudit. These findings widen the catalogue of chemically designed systems that are able to implement non-trivial quantum functionalities, such as quantum simulations and, especially, quantum error correction, at the molecular level.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a project entitled "Editor's Choice Articles" in Entropy. Please click here to find a list of high-quality and interesting papers that have been specifically recommended by our Editorial Board Members. Among which, we have selected 16 papers to display here. The following is the paper list.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the research groups of the exceptional papers for their contributions to Entropy. Finally, we would appreciate it if you would circulate this document among your colleagues or through your network.