Introductory notes for the Acta IMEKO first issue 2022 ACTA IMEKO ISSN: 2221-870X March 2022, Volume 11, Number 1, 1 - 1 ACTA IMEKO | www.imeko.org March 2022 | Volume 11 | Number 1 | 1 Introductory notes for the Acta IMEKO first issue 2022 Francesco Lamonaca1 1 Department of Department of Computer Science, Modeling, Electronics and Systems Engineering (DIMES), University of Calabria, Ponte P. Bucci, 87036, Arcavacata di Rende, Italy Section: EDITORIAL Citation: Francesco Lamonaca, Introductory notes for the Acta IMEKO first issue 2022, Acta IMEKO, vol. 11, no. 1, article 1, March 2022, identifier: IMEKO- ACTA-11 (2022)-01-01 Received March 30, 2022; In final form March 30, 2022; Published March 2022 Copyright: This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Corresponding author: Francesco Lamonaca, e-mail: editorinchief.actaimeko@hunmeko.org Dear Readers, The first issue of a new year is the time for balances. In the last year Acta IMEKO has moved huge steps towards the speed- up of the publication time and the attracting of high value papers. These improvements were also confirmed by the fact that Acta IMEKO is now indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ is one of the most important community-driven, open access service in the world and has a reputation for advocating best practices and standards in open access. It indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals, only. DOAJ's basic criteria for inclusion have become the accepted way of measuring an open access journal's adherence to standards in scholarly publishing, especially as concern with ethical and quality standards. This was achieved thanks to the evaluable work of the Editorial Board, the Section Editors, the Reviewers and, last but not least, all the Authors that have selected Acta IMEKO for sharing their research with the scientific community. This issue includes the special issue on the ‘IMEKO TC4 international conference on Metrology for Archaeology and Cultural heritage’ guest edited by Fabio Santaniello, Michele Fedel, Annaluisa Pedrotti and the special issue ‘Innovative Signal Processing and Communication Techniques for Measurement and Sensing Systems’ guest edited by Zia Ur Rahman. The first special issue collects papers on a hot topic archaeology and cultural heritage studied from the metrological point of view. The fact that the topic is hot is evident: although in full pandemic time, the conference has been a remarkable success with 158 initial submissions, 126 accepted papers, 431 authors from 19 countries, 4 invited plenary speakers, 13 special sessions, 3 tutorial sessions and 11 patronages. The presented papers have highlighted the natural need of exchange of knowledge and expertise between ‘human sciences’ and ‘hard sciences’. This contamination is evident also in the extended papers published in this issue. The Special Issue on ‘Innovative Signal Processing and Communication Techniques for Measurement and Sensing Systems’ consists of fifteen papers identifying new perspectives and highlighting potential research issues and challenges in the contest of measurement and sensing. Specifically, this special issue will demonstrate how the emerging technologies could be used in future smart sensing systems. The topics are heterogeneous and includes measurements for and by antennas, artificial intelligence, beam forming techniques, body area networks, embedded processors, image sensors and processing, Internet of Things, knowledge-based systems, machine learning algorithms, medical signal analysis, sensor data processing, VLSI architectures and many more. Many novelties are foreseen in this new year, for example the articles of the next issue will be online since the end of the month, and it will be closed at the end of June as foreseen. This new publication policy will strongly reduce the publication time of the submitted papers, they will be available online and indexed by Scopus as soon as they are ready. In order to keep the articles of different ‘special issues’ close together in the table of contents, we will not use consecutive page numbering throughout the issue beginning with this volume 11. The page numbers of every single article start with one and end with the number of the article’s pages. We hope that you will enjoy your readings and that you can confirm Acta IMEKO as your main source to find new solutions and ideas and a valuable resource for spreading your results. Francesco Lamonaca, Editor in Chief mailto:editorinchief.actaimeko@hunmeko.org