| description abstract | We are indeed very happy to have had the opportunity to work on this special issue and start what we hope will become an annual tradition. Special thanks to Professor Bala Balachandran for giving us the green light on this idea and to Amy Suski for helping us greatly at every step of the process. It was great working as a team on this project and we are excited to bring it to fruition. We happily took this opportunity to act on a project that we believe will help the MSNDC and VIB conferences, the JCND journal, and most importantly, the community at large. Indeed, we hope that through the publication of this special issue, its international readership will be reminded of the ASME IDETC-CIE conferences and their continued impact over the years. Perhaps this special issue will provide extra motivation for scholars to participate yet again, or perhaps for the first time, in this annual gathering of experts, students, and people new to the field. Conversely, the JCND will stand to benefit from bringing to its readership a selection of the best papers presented at the conference. The biggest winner, though, is the community at large. First, anyone who missed the Anaheim event will find in this special issue some of the conference highlights. Moreover, it is only fitting that a group of colleagues who took the time and effort to report on their recent research at the conference receive recognition for their hard and innovative work through this special issue, and it must be great work indeed given that the papers were selected through a rigorous peer selection and review process. The conference paper reviewers recommended a larger collection of manuscripts, which was then trimmed by the symposium organizers, before being down-selected yet again by our four-person group. The remaining manuscripts went through the standard JCND review process. The manuscripts that cleared this last hurdle make up this special issue. We hope you will enjoy them. | |
