Dear Friends and Colleagues in the Micromachines Community,

I am deeply honoured to welcome you all to the first international conference on Micromachines and Applications. The event which is held under these unusual circumstances was enabled by the great MDPI editorial team of Micromachines and I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those involved in organizing the event, for their great contribution to providing their expertise and time to establish the occasion, and to all those who have participated and will participate in the conference. This represents a great opportunity to remotely exchange ideas and get to know each other. We all are aware that the auspices of carrying research may not have been at their best since early 2020. However, the curiosity of people cannot be set at a standstill by anyone or anything. One proof is this conference, which was kindly called by MDPI Micromachines at the end of the last year. This conference is unique as it offers anyone who wishes to attend free access to all sessions, all papers and all valuable future materials resulting from this meeting. A few Special Issues are also intended to be published with the best presented papers, which will be included at a discounted rate. Details are provided on the website of the event.

Although the pandemic of 2020 came with a great deal of inconvenience, it also created the right conditions to validate some prior knowledge; that when people focus their will and their efforts towards an objective and manage to collaborate, they are successful. Such an example is the success of the multiple vaccines elaborated in such a short time span. We also learned to be more patient, to listen and help the ones that we are in contact with: family, friends, collaborators and colleagues. Traditionally, a conference is called to a venue such that the attractive location would add interest to the attendants. Unfortunately, this is not the case for this first event.

If an in-person conference has its own challenges in logistics, the online conference simplifies many of these issues but also makes things more difficult from the time scheduling point of view. However, we shall try to overcome the time-related issues by posting the presentations submitted by the authors as accessible video files.

I hope that the event will continue with a higher attendance next year as an in-person event. Again, I wish to take the opportunity to thank you for your interest in participation to this conference and to the ones which will follow. The scope of this conference covers a large field of microsystems and, hence, micromachines from the applications perspective. This conference proposed nine different fields of interest under which we received and finally accepted 74 papers. They will be presented over the next 16 days in the 9 organized sessions. As above mentioned, we also hope to be able to publish some Special Issues which will include the best papers presented during the conference.

There is a tradition that each welcome talk includes some food for thought. This one will not be different. The subject of thinking that I propose is the speed of progress in science. About 12,000 years ago, humanity started the journey through a lengthy process of improving the quality and the quantity of produced food through improved farming practice. That was the first agricultural revolution. A few more occurred over the many centuries that followed. Improvement of agriculture represents an open topic today. Only about 250 years ago, the industrial revolution took off in full swing. At the present time, we are witnessing the process of a scientific revolution intertwined with an information revolution which started only a few decades ago. Both are ongoing hand-in-hand at the present time and the speed of progress induced by them is unprecedented. Micromachines and nanotechnologies play their own important role in this process, namely: embedding intelligence in materials and structures, miniaturization, creation of functionalized materials, development of medical devices with great capability to monitor and maintain vital parameters within the human body, wearable devices, production of liposomes embedding rigorous sequences of DNA which fight foul viruses, and development of new materials for which either technology of fabrication of disposal technologies that would not leave any footprint on the environment. The efforts of this generation in acquiring knowledge brings significant value, which is continuously transferred as common knowledge to the next generation, which will further will process the information and will yield novel perspectives, technologies and devices, the likes of which we might not even dream at this time. I believe that it is amazing to be part of this great process, which is part of our evolution as researchers. Micromachines carry a very particular feature which may not be common to many other scientific branches; namely, they are multi-disciplinary. Micromachines find their applications anywhere from medicine and healthcare to aerospace; from pharmaceuticals to condition monitoring. The researchers who carry out research in micromachines should be aware that their ideas are required to be animated by other researchers in other disciplines, who seek to improve a certain aspect of the performance of devices used in their field of expertise. Any industry could benefit from micromachines, fast computation and machine learning. Even the classic occupations such as agriculture could benefit from micromachines. Hence, every single field of interest is well received within our community and the findings are shared among the users. Although the MEMS research community was relatively limited, the first publication—a joint journal between IEEE and ASME—appeared in 1991. Since then, very few publications have gained the respect of the research community. Micromachines was fast accepted by the MEMS researchers as the journal that promotes and encourages free thinking and novel ideas. A new generation of researchers grew strong and their contributions to the field were hard to predict, say, 10 years ago. The proposed concepts are the result of preceding published research in combination with the great imagination of the younger generation, which is strongly driven by interest in the environment and concern about the climate change.

In the present global scientific collaborative village, access to knowledge has been made easy. We are proud to acknowledge the great contribution of MDPI to providing access to knowledge for thousands of new researchers. It is vital to ensure a rigorous growth in knowledge by passing to the new generation all data and the information which may help the advancement of knowledge and the new findings. I believe that our duty—the duty of all researchers—is to involve the new generation of curious researchers into projects as they are more than able to contribute to the progress of knowledge. In a few decades, they will be the ones reporting findings with solutions that we currently crave. The involvement of young researches in the learning process of research is essential as the young minds can think without being bound or inhibited by any constraints. We have the duty to involve in our present projects young people of all backgrounds, gender, color or religion, as knowledge has nothing to do with all these.

Again, I wish to welcome everyone who participates to this conference, which will hopefully become a tradition within the microsystems’ community.

Kind regards,

Prof. Dr. Ion Stiharu

Submissions should be completed by the authors online by registering on www.sciforum.net, and using the "Start New Submission" function once logged into system.

1. Scholars interested in participating in the conference can submit their abstract (about 200-250 words) online on this website until 30 September 2020 14 March 2021.
2. The Conference Committee will pre-evaluate, based on the submitted abstract, whether a contribution from the authors of the abstract will be welcome in the Micromachines 2021—Micromachines and Applications. All authors will be notified by 15 October 2020 17 March 2021 about the acceptance of their abstract.
3. If the abstract is accepted for this conference, the authors will be invited to prepare a full description of their work in the form of a PowerPoint presentation /poster, until the submission deadline of 31 October 2020 7 April 2021.
4. The conference presentations will be available on https://sciforum.net/conference/Micromachines2021 for discussion during the time of the conference 15 November–30 November 2020 15 April–30 April 2021.
5. Accepted abstracts will be published in the Journal Engineering Proceedings. After the conference, the authors are recommended to submit a full manuscript based on the proceedings to the Micromachines Special Issue "Selected Papers from ICMA2021" with a 20% discount of the APC charges.

* Special Issue Submission deadline: 15 July 2021

Presentation Slides

Authors are encouraged to prepare a presentation in PowerPoint or similar software, to be displayed online along with the manuscript. Slides, if available, will be displayed directly on the website using Sciforum.net's proprietary slides viewer. Slides can be prepared in exactly the same way as for any traditional conference where research results can be presented. Slides should be converted to the PDF format before submission so that our process can easily and automatically convert them for online displaying.

The following organization is recommended for your presentation:

• Length of the presentation: no more than 20 slides

• Slide 1 (strictly one slide): Title, authors’ names, affiliation(s), email address of the corresponding Author, and, not mandatory, logos of the laboratory and/or institution;

• Slide 2 (strictly one slide): Graphical Abstract, repeat the title of the presentation but avoid other text as much as possible;

• Slide 3 (strictly one slide): Abstract (max 200 words) and 3-5 keywords separated by semicolons;

• Slide 4 and following slides: should contain Introduction, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions in this sequence.

• Last slide: Acknowledgments and, not mandatory, logos of sponsors of the work.

Other formats (word document or poster) can also be considered.

ICMA-2021-PPT-template

Video Presentations

Authors are also encouraged to submit video presentations. If you are interested in submitting a video presentation, please contact the conference organizer ([email protected]) to get to learn more about the procedure.

Tips for authors: If you would like to prepare a video based on your PowerPoint presentation, you may use the "record slide" function in the PowerPoint. The video will be uploaded to YouTube, as well as onto Sciforum. The video should be no longer than 20 minutes and be prepared in one of the following formats:

• .MP4
• .webm
• .ogg

The video should be submitted via email before 7 April 2021.

Potential Conflicts of Interest

All authors must disclose all relationships or interests that could inappropriately influence or bias their work. This should be conveyed in a separate "Conflict of Interest" statement preceding the "Acknowledgments" and "References" sections at the end of the manuscript. If there is no conflict, please state "The authors declare no conflict of interest." Financial support for the study must be fully disclosed under "Acknowledgments" section.

Copyright

MDPI, the publisher of the Sciforum.net platform, is an open access publisher. We believe that authors should retain the copyright to their scholarly works. Hence, by submitting a Communication paper to this conference, you retain the copyright of your paper, but you grant MDPI the non-exclusive right to publish this paper online on the Sciforum.net platform. This means you can easily submit your paper to any scientific journal at a later stage and transfer the copyright to its publisher (if required by that publisher).