Welcome from the President of the IEEE Control Systems Society

The IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) is the flagship in the Control Systems Society's set of conferences. It is hosted by the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Japanese Society for Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and the European Control Association (EUCA).

By every measure, CDC is a highly successful conference in terms of participation and technical quality. But why is that? What are the components needed to make a successful conference? In one of the recent Presidential Columns in the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, I asked the question of why people attend our conferences. The answers I got from our membership painted a clear picture. The number one reason people attend our conferences is to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and to network. A close second was to keep a finger on the technical pulse and see what is going on in the community. Reason number three was “interesting locations”. The 62nd CDC in Singapore has all these elements in spades! The technical program is great. The excitement about being back in person after a global pandemic is palatable, and as far as interesting locations go, Singapore is hard to beat.

But, perhaps the most important (yet sometimes forgotten) reason why a conference is successful is great and dedicated organizers. As someone who has served as both General Chair and Program Chair for past CDCs, I know firsthand the effort and hard work that is required to pull off a conference of this scale. I want to thank the General Chair, Lihua Xie, the Program Co-Chairs, Karl H. Johansson and Guoqiang Hu, and all the members of the Organizing Committee for putting together a stellar conference.

While the organizing committee may be the public-facing side of the conference, I also want to thank the unsung heroes on the IEEE CSS Conference Editorial Board, chaired by Amir Aghdam. Together, they fight the Second Law of Thermodynamics by reducing the entropy in the world through the diligent organization of thousands of papers, reviews, and editorial decisions.

Serving as the President for the IEEE Control Systems Society is a great honor, and I am very proud to play a small part in the technical society that supports CDC. Our conferences are ultimately all about community – technical as well as social. And I am very excited about the program that the organizers of the 62nd CDC have prepared for us. Take advantage of the program on display inside the session rooms. But, perhaps more importantly, don’t miss out on the (oftentimes informal) program outside sessions.