Announcements

On behalf of the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Kevin H. Knuth, we are pleased to announce the winners of the Entropy Best Paper Award for 2019.

The winning nominations were selected by the Evaluation Committee, chaired by the Editor-in-Chief and supported by 13 Editorial Board Members. The three top-voted papers, in no particular order, have won the 2019 Entropy Best Paper Award:

Levitated Nanoparticles for Microscopic Thermodynamics—A Review
Jan Gieseler and James Millen
Entropy 2018, 20(5), 326; https://doi.org/10.3390/e20050326
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/5/326

Transductive Feature Selection Using Clustering-Based Sample Entropy for Temperature Prediction in Weather Forecasting
Zahra Karevan and Johan A.K. Suykens
Entropy 2018, 20(4), 264; https://doi.org/10.3390/e20040264
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/4/264

Pointwise Partial Information Decomposition Using the Specificity and Ambiguity Lattices
Conor Finn and Joseph T. Lizier
Entropy 2018, 20(4), 297; https://doi.org/10.3390/e20040297
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/4/297

The editorial team would like to congratulate the winners of the 2019 Entropy Best Paper Award and thank the authors for having chosen Entropy to publish their work.

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: office@encyclopedia.pub)

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the Best Presentation Award that Entropy sponsored at the 5th International Electronic Conference on Entropy and Its Applications (ECEA-5), held from 18 to 30 November 2019.

“Spin Waves and Skyrmions in Magneto-Ferroelectric Superlattices: Theory and Simulation” by Hung T. Diep, Ildus F. Sharafullin

We are pleased to announce that Entropy has passed the milestone of 5000 papers since its inception in 1999. Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300) is an open-access journal of entropy and information studies, published monthly online by MDPI. It is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Scopus, with a 2018 Impact Factor of 2.419, which corresponds to rank 28/81 (Q2) in the JCR category “Physics, Multidisciplinary”.

Our sincere thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Entropy, Prof. Dr. Kevin H. Knuth, and all the Editorial Board members, as well as Guest Editors of Special Issues, who have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence. In addition, we also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and important contributions of our dedicated reviewers. We wish to thank you all for your support, and hope to receive more quality submissions from you in the future.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the presentation award that Entropy sponsored at the Complexity, Criticality and Computation Symposium (C3-2019) held at the University of Sydney (Camperdown, Australia) on 2–5 December 2019.

"Fishy Business: Noise-Induced Schooling in Fish" by Richard Morris

I reported on our work concerning the dynamics of collective alignment in groups of the cichlid fish, Etroplus suratensis. Focusing on small-to-intermediate sized groups (10 < N < 100), we demonstrate that schooling (highly polarised and coherent motion) is noise-induced, arising from the intrinsic stochasticity associated with finite numbers of interacting fish. The fewer the fish, the greater the (multiplicative) noise and therefore the likelihood of alignment. Such rare empirical evidence tightly constrains the possible underlying interactions that govern fish alignment, suggesting that E. suratensis either spontaneously change their direction or copy the direction of other fish, without any local averaging (the otherwise canonical mechanism of collective alignment). The work highlights the importance of stochasticity in behavioural inference: rather than simply obscuring otherwise deterministic dynamics, noise can be fundamental to the characterisation of emergent collective behaviours.

MDPI will be attending the 149th TMS 2020 on minerals, metals, and materials in San Diego, CA, USA, 23–27 February 2020. An Editorial Board Member meeting of Metals will take place during this event. We warmly welcome you join and share your publishing experience with us.

TMS2020 will present more than 85 symposia planned by all five TMS technical divisions and covering a broad range of topics related to minerals, metals, and materials science and engineering. The event will draw more than 4000 attendees and feature four full days of technical programming.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

Metals

Coatings

Materials

Applied Sciences

Nanomaterials

Energies

Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing

Entropy

If you are also attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (Booth #726). Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person to answer any questions you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.tms.org/TMS2020.

We are pleased to announce that Entropy has passed the milestone of 5000 papers since its inception in 1999. Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300) is an open-access journal of entropy and information studies, published monthly online by MDPI. It is now covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Scopus, with a 2018 Impact Factor of 2.419, which corresponds to rank 28/81 (Q2) in the JCR category “Physics, Multidisciplinary”.

Our sincere thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of Entropy, Prof. Dr. Kevin H. Knuth, and all the Editorial Board members, as well as Guest Editors of Special Issues, who have ensured the continued success of the journal through their hard work and diligence. In addition, we also acknowledge the many valuable publications from our authors and important contributions of our dedicated reviewers. We wish to thank you all for your support, and hope to receive more quality submissions from you in the future.

MDPI is pleased to announce the release of SciProfiles, its social network platform for researchers and scholars.

The purpose of SciProfiles is aligned with MDPI’s broad mission to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and to serve scholars and communities by providing opportunities for academic networking.

SciProfiles also ambitions to serve as a sustainable, transparent and community-driven research evaluation system aligned with the DORA principles (https://sfdora.org/). Through their scientific profiles, academics can highlight their contribution to research communities, and measure their impact on their field, beyond publication numbers and impact factors. SciProfiles is currently a beta version and will enrich to give researchers the possibility to highlight all of their contributions to science and their scientific communities as authors, reviewers, editors, conference organizers, conference panelists, conference keynote speakers, or even as lecturers or student mentors at their University.

The classic components of popular community social networks, including follower/following, classical metrics, endorsements and recommendations (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1690), comments (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/1397) are or will be very soon highlighted in SciProfiles as open science contributions.

To help increase the impact and visibility of articles and their authors to an appropriate audience, the platform offers a NewsFeed that includes recommendations of relevant content based on interests, publication history, saved searches or colleagues’ recommendations.

SciProfiles’ avatars are now being integrated on several MDPI platforms, meaning that you will directly access researchers’ profiles from any of the MDPI platforms:

MDPI's journal publishing website: www.mdpi.com
MDPI's conference hosting and management website: www.sciforum.net
MDPI's pre-print website : www.preprints.org
MDPI's knowledge sharing website : www.encyclopedia.pub
MDPI's books store: www.mdpi.com/books
MDPI's literature database : www.scilit.com

SciProfiles aims to serve scientific communities at large. It can be embedded into third-party websites and also welcomes integration of data from third-parties.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/2
Dr. Franck Vazquez: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/FranckVazquez
Dr. Martyn Rittman: https://sciprofiles.com/profile/martynrittman

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 MDPI Writing Prize. Entrants were asked to write on the theme "Judging research: How should research and researchers be evaluated and rewarded?" We received a large number of excellent essays from PhD students and postdocs, and the process of shortlisting and choosing winners was not an easy one. The winners demonstrated excellent writing skills alongside interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

As last year, we will begin the process of collating all entries into a book that will be available in open access format. Alongside promoting good writing skills, we see the prize as a way to promote the voices of early career researchers within broader debates and policy discussions.

Congratulations to all of the participants and especially the winners. The winners are:

1st Prize (500 CHF):
Albin Nilsson (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland)
[Read here]

2nd Prize (250 CHF):
Qi Zhang (Shandong University, Jinan, China)
[Read here]
Igor Ogashawara (Indiana University, Indianapolis, US)
[Read here]

3rd Prize (100 CHF):
Margaret Sivapragasam (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia)
[Read here]
Arvind Sharma (The University of Queensland, Gatton, Australia)
[Read here]
Jose Flores-Guerrero (University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands)
[Read here]

The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks, and image editing.

Entropy is recruiting Editorial Board members for the following six sections:

• Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Black Holes Section;
• Entropy Reviews Section;
• Entropy and Biology Section;
• Signal and Data Analysis Section;
• Multidisciplinary Applications Section;
• Time Section.

The journal is looking to expand the Editorial Board and cover areas that are less well-represented by the current team. If you are interested to serve as an Academic Editor on the editorial board, or have potential candidates to recommend, please reach out to us by 31 December 2019.

Entropy (IF 2.419; ISSN 1099-4300) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of entropy and information studies. It is fully covered by the leading indexing and abstracting services, including Scopus and SCIE (Web of Science).

As an Editorial Board member, you have the following responsibilities:

- To make decisions on whether a manuscript can be accepted, or not, based on the reports we collect;
- Reviewing a couple of manuscripts per year;
- Editing a Special Issue on a topic related to your research interests when it is convenient for you;
- Recommending timely topics or appropriate conferences;
- Promoting Enrtopy and increasing its visibility at related academic conferences.

To apply or request further information, please contact the Entropy Editorial
Office (entropy@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.