In this Special Section, we highlight several of the key significant results that were presented at this conference by presenting nine papers, each of which highlights the theme of the conference and has been technically extended beyond the conference version. Thus, we are sharing new and updated results and advances in automatic testing. It is also exciting to note that these papers exhibit strong collaboration between academia and industry, thus leading to a strong balance between theory and practice in their contributions. The nine papers in this Special Section have been organized into three general categories that have strong interest within the automatic testing community. The first group of papers focuses on the advances in test and diagnosis technology. The second group of papers focuses on the result in the emerging field of prognostics and health management. And the final group of papers focuses on recent work in the area of synthetic instrumentation for automatic test.