Meet the Editors | Prof. Dr. Andrea Prati - Section EiC of Computing and Artificial Intelligence

1. Please talk about your work experience before becoming Section Editor-in-Chief.

I am currently Full Professor of Computer Engineering at University of Parma, Italy. Before that, I was Associate Professor at the same university (2015–2019) and at University IUAV of Venice, Italy (2011–2015). My academic career started in 2005 as Assistant Professor at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. My main research topics are related to computer vision and pattern recognition, ranging from intelligent video surveillance, machine vision for industrial applications, deep learning, etc.

Before becoming Section EiC for Applied Sciences, I was (and currently am) actively involved in other editorial duties, as both a reviewer (for several international conferences and journals) and an associate/area editor. These duties, on the one hand, take time from our other official duties (teaching and research), but, on the other hand, are services useful for the scientific community at large. Without volunteers to both handle and review papers, the scientific peer-review system would basically collapse.

2. What has been your biggest achievement since you began your role as Section Editor-in-Chief?

I guess I can consider myself as a humble contributor to the success of Applied Sciences as a whole. Applied Sciences has increased its overall impact factor in 2018 to 2.217 (from around 1.7 in 2017) and increased the number of articles from around 1.2M in 2017 to 3.1M in 2018, while maintaining an acceptance rate of around 30%. This improvement elevated the journal into Q1 in SJR of the Engineering miscellaneous category, and to Q3 from Q4 in the Computer Science applications category. Still, much has to be done to promote Applied Sciences and the Computing and Artificial Intelligence section, especially due to the number of older and more eminent journals of Computer Science.

3. What kind of research do you looking forward to publishing? Which research topics do you think are of particular interest to the research community at present?

Considering my specific research fields, the hot topics are related to deep learning techniques, especially for generative networks, few- and zero-shot learning, and multi-modal multi-class networks. Other emerging fields are related to vision–language–text joint learning and classification, as well as 3D recognition and synthesis.

4. Applied Sciences is an Open Access publication. How do you think Open Access impacts authors?

Definitely positively. There are two advantages of Open Access publications for authors: first, their accepted paper can be seen (and thus cited) by more people than in the case of restricted access publications; second, most of the countries are pushing towards Open Access in science (e.g., projects funded under European Commission calls are requested to produce Open Access publications).