The first four articles of this issue of the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC) are the successful peer-reviewed submissions from seven extended contributions that were presented at the 9th ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Smart Structures and Materials (SMART), held in Paris (France) from 8 to 11 July 2019. Since 2003, the SMART series is held in the odd years in Europe, with the previous conferences in Poland (2003, 2007), Portugal (2005, 2009, 2015), Germany (2011), Italy (2013) and Spain (2017). This major European scientific event aims at providing a comprehensive forum for discussing the state of the art of the highly active research field of smart structures and materials and for developing future multidisciplinary ideas. The technical program of SMART 2019 included 195 contributions in 37 sessions that included 7 plenary, 28 oral, and 2 poster (PS) sessions. They were grouped in 5 general sessions (GSs), 13 mini-symposia (MS) and 2 PS. Additionally, 176 full papers were included in the e-book proceedings. The four articles in this issue are representatives of the ‘GS03: Smart systems’ (Kraus et al., 2020), ‘MS07: Modelling and design of smart composite structures’ (Araújo and Madeira, 2020) and ‘MS10: Vibration mitigation through electromechanical couplings’ (Guillot et al., 2020; Høgsberg, 2020). These topics are in line with those of JVC, particularly ‘Adaptive and smart structures’, ‘Vibration and control of structures’, ‘Vibration and control of machinery’, ‘Vibration absorbers’, ‘Structural control’, and ‘Structural acoustics’. Indeed, Araújo and Madeira (2020) addressed the issue of vibration and noise reduction in laminated sandwich plates using piezoelectric patches with passive shunted damping, while Høgsberg (2020) presented a consistent frequency matching calibration procedure, common for electromagnetic and piezoelectric shunt passive absorbers. On the other hand, Kraus et al. (2020) dealt with a planar flexible robot equipped with three degrees of freedom planar active absorbers. Finally, Guillot et al. (2020) investigated theoretically and experimentally the 1:3 internal resonance in a cantilever elastically isotropic beam with piezoceramic patches. As a closure, the guest editors are very thankful to the authors for their valuable contributions and to the reviewers for their sound reports. Besides, they are very grateful to JVC Senior Editor (SE) Hashemi ASHRAFIUON and Associate Editor (AE) Yi-Qing NI for managing one submission each, as well as to AE Gyuhae PARK for managing two submissions. Special thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief Mehdi AHMADIAN for accepting that JVC supports SMART 2019 by devoting to it this special issue (SI) and for granting AE Ayech BENJEDDOU the additional role of SE in order to freely organize this SI, manage the three remaining submissions, and communicate with the journal administration and publisher. Finally, we hope that this ‘picture’ from SMART 2019 brings new knowledge and ideas to its research community, contributes to open minds and widen research interests of the readers of JVC, contributes to its further success and recognition by the European SMART community, and increases the exposure of the former to the latter.