Special Session #11

Food safety and quality are critical issues for human nutrition and health.
The food industry is strongly committed to providing safe and high-quality food products, while addressing the issue of monitoring the quality of food processing. For this reason, it is of fundamental importance to develop techniques and methods for food quality control in order to maximize productivity, allowing to obtain high food quality and reduce food fraud.

In this context, instruments, measurements, and methods for food analysis can help ensure products meet the quality requirements and standards, which can lead to greater customer satisfaction and confidence in products safety and quality.

This special issue is dedicated to food sensors, measurements, and analysis methods. It offers the opportunity to discuss the state of the art on this crucial topic for food quality, covering the entire food chain from primary agri-food production to final consumption. These issues are among the objectives of the PNRR METROFOOD-IT project (https://www.metrofood.it/en/) which aims to strengthen the Italian Research infrastructure for Metrology and Open Access Data to support the agri-food sector.

Submissions are encouraged, but not limited to, the following general areas:

• Measurement techniques;
• IoT sensors for agrifood applications also in point-of-need context;
• Electronic tongues/noses;
• AI in Instrumentation and Measurement for the agri-food sector.

Ilaria De Munari, (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information technologies from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 1991 and 1995, respectively. In 1997, she joined the Department of Information Engineering (now Department of Engineering and Architecture), University of Parma, as a Research Assistant, where she has been an Associate Professor of electronics since 2004. She has authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in technical journals or proceedings of international conferences. Her past research interests include the reliability of electronic devices and the design of electronic systems for active assisted living. In this framework, she was involved in several European projects. Her current research interests include the design of digital systems based on microcontrollers and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In particular, she is dealing with the design of sensors for human activity recognition, electrochemical applications, and the evaluation of the battery state of charge through machine learning algorithms; moreover, she dealt with the FPGA implementation of arithmetic circuits and error correction code techniques.
Dr. Munari is an Associate Editor of the journal IEEE ACCESS.

Valentina Bianchi, (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Information Engineering, University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 2003, 2006, and 2010, respectively. She is currently a Research Associate with the Department of Information Engineering, University of Parma. She has participated in several national and international projects. She has authored or coauthored over 50 papers in international journals or proceedings of conferences. Her current research interests include the design and validation of sensors for human activity recognition and for electrochemical and agrifood applications. Moreover, she is involved in designing digital systems implemented on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), with a special focus on the design of hardware for machine learning algorithms and arithmetic circuits applied also to the evaluation of the batteries State of Charge.
Dr. Bianchi is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT.