HES conference is a meeting point for different cultures and expertise. The HES-19 edition was particularly important because it celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the conference. In fact, starting from the early beginning in the year 1998, the conference has become more and more of an attractive event for academics and professionals working in the broad area of electro-technologies. Devices and systems exploiting electromagnetic heating in all its forms, such as conduction, induction and

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... icrowaves, are the main focus of our community. HES-19 was organized at Padua University in the period 22-24 May 2019. The main developments in the area of electroheat are strictly related to the deep understanding of physical processes, which in turn are fostered by the multi-physics approach to modelling and simulation. In most applications, in fact, the solution of standalone electromagnetic or thermal problems is no longer sufficient, and coupling among different physical domains is mandatory. In this respect, electromagnetics, heat transfer and thermodynamics, magneto-fluid dynamics, phase transitions, residual stresses are considered as coupled domains in the contributed papers. Many computational methods have been presented, but not all of them appear convenient enough for use in practical engineering. In fact, technical and industrial challenges set some principal requirements and criteria for efficient computational methods. In this respect, the main task of a researcher consists of reducing the still intractable problems of field analysis and synthesis to the search for cost-effective approximate solutions based on friendly tools. This is one of the most important messages which came out of the conference. A growing field of research presented at the conference is the electromagnetic processing of materials, where the electromagnetic field with different characteristics (high or low intensity, single or multi-phase, DC, AC, high or low frequency) is used to obtain materials with improved properties. The research in more traditional fields, such as induction heating, is also moving towards new applications and asks for a deeper understanding of different phenomena during heat treatment processes. Several papers deal with home appliances of induction heating, with a special attention to increasing the efficiency and reducing the cost of induction systems; in this respect, induction cooktop is nowadays one of the most promising fields of application. As far as induction hardening is concerned, most of papers deal with multi-physics simulation of the process with the evaluation of temperature distribution, phase change during the process, hardening profiles, deformations and residual stresses. In turn, inverse problems in induction heating are another class of emerging topics: a typical issue is to synthesize the distribution of currents in the winding, which gives rise to a prescribed thermal profile along the workpiece. The exploitation of multi-objective optimization techniques and evolutionary computing algorithms help the solution of the inverse problem. Another important event was the panel session organized according to a triplicate flow: (1) First, a short focus on a few hot topics in our community, such as multi-physics modelling and optimal synthesis methods, is more oriented to scientific aspects. (2) Next, a possible scenario of "Inductor 4.0", i.e. a paradigm of multi-sensorized and IoT-connected inductive systems for big data exploitation, is more oriented to technological aspects.