We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Yaguo Lei has been appointed Section Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Machines Testing and Maintenance” in Machines (ISSN: 2075-1702).

Prof. Dr. Yaguo Lei received his B.E. degree and Ph.D. degree, both in mechanical engineering, from Xi’an Jiaotong University, P. R. China, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. He is currently a professor in mechanical engineering at the Xi’an Jiaotong University, P. R. China. He worked at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and at the University of Alberta, Canada, as a postdoctoral research fellow. He is also a fellow of ASME, IET, and ISEAM; a senior member of IEEE; and a senior member of CMES, ORSC and CAA; and as an Associate Editor and Editorial Board Member of IEEE TIE, MSSP, NC&A, MST, etc. His research interests include health condition monitoring and intelligent maintenance, big-data-era intelligent fault diagnostics and prognostics, reliability evaluation and remaining useful life prediction, mechanical signal analysis and processing, and mechanical system dynamic modeling. He has pioneered many signal processing techniques and intelligent models for diagnosing mechanical faults. He has accomplished three monographies and published over 80 peer-reviewed papers on signal processing and fault diagnostics.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Yaguo Lei, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take on the role as its Section Editor-in-Chief?
I have collaborated with the journal Machines for a long time. I have witnessed great development in the journal in the past years, including publication quality, academic impact, etc. The journal has been very much active in the publication of cutting-edge research works in its related fields. The published papers have significantly inspired researchers all over the world. The "Machines Testing and Maintenance" Section has become a remarkable source of the latest research in this field, which is one of the major research areas in my group. Therefore, I feel very much appreciative to be appointed Editor-in-Chief of this Section.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
Considering the great efforts of the journal in the past years, I believe the journal will surely be attracting increasing worldwide attention. At present, high-end machine-related technologies have been hot topics, and the applications of the related research works have achieved great success in real industries. Therefore, the journal will continue to gain interest in the future and lead research in related areas.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
In recent years, machine big data have become available, and artificial intelligence technologies have experienced remarkable developments. In my opinion, this field of research will benefit more and more from big data and AI in the future, which enable us to learn underlying machine-related patterns that we did not know before. Big-data-driven machine testing and maintenance will be hot areas, as will the methodologies of integrating both machine big data and physical knowledge.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
Open access is certainly a future trend in the publishing field. The knowledge produced by scholars all over the world is supposed to be extensively shared to further promote research. The traditional subscription mode has certain limitations in scientific communications. However, as a well-established approach to publication, the traditional way cannot be entirely replaced in the near future, and it will possibly take a long time for everyone to gradually accept this new and beneficial publishing mode.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Yaguo Lei as he starts his new role as Section Editor-in-Chief, and we look forward to him leading Machines to achieve many more milestones.