Announcements

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

The Entropy Steering Committee seeks Expressions of Interest (EoI) from universities/organizations/individual scholars to host an edition of the Entropy Conference Series. There is no restriction in the geographic areas considered.

What is Entropy?

Entropy is a conference series dedicated to bring together scientists and leaders from different areas to discuss important recent developments and ideas of cutting-edge research related to Entropy.

The First Entropy conference was held in 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. This conference brought researchers with an inter-disciplinary nature of contributions from both theoretical and applied perspectives of Entropy, that ranged from Physics to Information theory. You can find a brief summary of the first edition here.

The Selection Committee looks forward to receiving your EoI. Please feel free to forward this call for EoI to other interested parties.

Please note that the follow-on editions will not be restrained to the topics discussed in previous editions and, therefore, new and different topics within the Entropy field are sought.

Important Dates

The Entropy conference is organized every two years. The Entropy Steering Committee is accepting EoIs to organize editions from 2020 onwards.

Facts

Bidders must have the facility to organize and host a three-day symposium of roughly 150–200 participants including:

• Easy access to the symposium venue and the capability to offer a wide range of services, such as catering, WLAN and internet services, organization of social events.
• Ability to cover all costs with registration fees and sponsoring.

When necessary, and based on the input provided by the local host, MDPI will provide administrative support and will manage the website on Sciforum. MDPI will help to edit the abstracts and prepare the conference book. MDPI will help to design the logos and banners for the conference website, flyers, posters, roll-ups, lanyards, conference bags, etc. following the style of previous Entropy edition. MDPI will promote the new conference edition on relevant MDPI journals and any other relevant communication channels.

Expression of Interest Instructions

1. EoI must be submitted to EoI@mdpi.com by 30 November 2018
2. The length of the application should not exceed two A4 pages and should include:
   • Name(s) of the bidder(s), contact details and a short biography
   • Name of the planned venue (city and infrastructure)
   • Proposed dates for the conference
   • Proposed topics for the conference

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

Our editors will be attending the 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2018), to be held in Guangzhou, China, on 25–29 November 2018.

ITW 2018 solicits and welcomes original contributions on the frontiers of information theory, coding theory and their applications, as well as the frontiers with other fields of study such as data science, biology and signal processing. The conference structure consists of a daily plenary seminar followed by two parallel paper sessions throughout the day.

The following four MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Information
Challenges
Cryptography

The editorial team of Entropy would like to congratulate the winners of the two Best Early Career Researcher Presentation Awards that Entropy sponsored at the Workshop on Methods of Information Theory in Computational Neuroscience in Seattle (USA) on 17–18 July 2018. Dr. Joseph Lizier (The University of Sydney), the Editorial Board Member of Entropy and Chair of the Workshop, granted the certificate to the winners:

Dr. Siwei Wang (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for her work “Closing the gap from structure to function with information theoretic design principles”;

Dr. Rainer Engelken (Columbia University) for his work “How input spike trains and recurrent dynamics shape the entropy of cortical circuits”.

Congratulations to both of them!

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

The editorial team of Entropy is happy to announce the winner of the Best Paper Award at the Max Ent 2018 conference, held in British Library, London, UK on 2–6 July 2018. The most outstanding paper was selected by an evaluation committee chaired by Prof. Emma McCoy.

The Editor-in-Chief of Entropy, Prof. Dr. Kevin H. Knuth (University at Albany, NY, USA), granted the certificate to the winner Mr. Sascha Ranftl (Graz University of Technology, Austria), whose work was titled “Bayesian Analysis of Femtosecond Pump-Probe Photoelectron-Photoion Coincidence Spectra”.

The awarded paper sheds light on the statistics of coincidence measurements, where a single electron is assigned to a single ion, both originating from the same ionization event. In combination with ultrafast lasers, this technique allows to understand the dynamics of molecules in the regime of femtoseconds. By employing Bayesian probability theory to deal with false coincidences, which an experimentalist cannot distinguish from true coincidences, the authors find significant impact on the analysis of the experimental data, and the interpretation of the underlying physical processes therefore.

Sascha Ranftl recently completed his Master’s Thesis, in the role of an experimentalist, in the femtosecond laser lab under the supervision of Prof. Markus Koch (Institute of Experimental Physics) and now enrolled in a PhD at the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang von der Linden. His current research interest concerns applications of Bayesian inference in the field of biomedical engineering, particularly computational biomechanics and the modelling and simulation of the life-threatening disease “aortic dissection”.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the two poster awards that Entropy sponsored at the Linnaeus Conference: Towards Ultimate Quantum Theory (UQT) in Växö (Sweden) on 11–14 June, 2018.

1st prize (350 CHF, certificate)

“A quest for an epistemic reset in higher dimensional space” by R.C.-Z. Quehenberger

Suggests a unified world view by means of a five-dimensional geometry that renders Kaluza-Klein’s theories—as confirmed by Louis de Broglie in 1927—visually accessible. Moreover, this unification between the GRT-cosmology and QM derived from the 3D representation of the Penrose Kites and darts tiling provides fundamental structures used in quantum information, as well as in Kepler’s planetary motions as comprised in the Poincaré homology sphere as a model for the universe.

2nd prize (150 CHF, certificate)

“Quantum Field with Time as a Dynamical Variable” by H.Y. Yau

Proposes that the properties of a zero-spin bosonic field can be reconciled by allowing matter to vibrate in time. These temporal vibrations are introduced to restore symmetry between time and space in the matter field. The system, with vibrations of matter in time, obeys the Klein–Gordon equation and the Schrödinger equation. The observable energy is quantized under the constraint that a particle's mass is on shell. There is only a probability of observing a particle at a given location. In addition, the spacetime outside a particle with oscillation in time satisfies the Schwarzschild field solution.

MDPI will be attending the 2018 Quantum Technology International Conference (QTech 2018), to be held in Paris, France, 5–7 September 2018.

The objective of the QTech conference is to present the latest developments of quantum technologies in the domains of quantum communication, computation, simulation, sensors and metrology, and their implementation using various platforms from atoms and ions to solid states, superconducting circuits and optics.

The following eight MDPI journals will be represented:

Entropy
Technologies
Atoms
Photonics
Computation
Condensed Matter
Cryptography
Quantum Reports

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (you can find us easily in the exhibition area). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have concerning open access publishing and our journals. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://premc.org/conferences/qtech-quantum-technology/.