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