Abstract :
The 19th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) (see http://etfa2014.org) was held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, in September 2014 (Figure 1). This was the second time the ETFA conference was held in Barcelona, with the first time being in 1999. This was also the third time after 1999 and 2009 that the ETFA conference was cosponsored by the Universitat Polit?cnica de Catalunya?BarcelonaTech, which is one of the leading teaching and research institutions in Europe and top ranked in Spain, with focus on engineering, sciences, and management. The 2014 event was also cosponsored by the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES). It has been a long-standing tradition of the ETFA conference series to cooperate with the IES.