Welcome from the President of the IEEE Control Systems Society

The IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) is the flagship conference organized by the Control Systems Society in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Japanese Society for Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), the European Control Association (EUCA), and the Technical Committee on Control Theory of the Chinese Association of Automation (TCCT). As always, the 2025 CDC is set to bring us excellent technical presentations via its 175 technical sessions and 4 plenaries, and the highest quality papers via its conference proceedings.

The CDC, now in its 64th edition, is being held in South America for the first time! As I’ve recently discussed in my President’s Column in the Control Systems magazine, there are many factors considered in selecting the site of our conferences. Rio de Janeiro is an exceptionally appropriate site for CDC; it has multiple major universities and the UFRJ/COPPE in close proximity, as well as shipbuilding, finance, petroleum and other controls-relevant industries, and allows us to expand on our remarkable network of volunteers, participants, and controls experts who collectively make this conference the premier event that it is.

This CDC has required an enormous organizational effort due to the multitudinous logistics involved in setting the technical program, arranging numerous technical and social events and meetings, and configuring a conference banquet, receptions and coffee breaks for well over 1500 participants. To General Co-Chairs Ioannis Paschalidis and João Carlos Basilio, Program Co-Chairs Na Li and Christoforos Hadjicostis, and the entire 2025 CDC Organizing Committee: Thank you for your amazing efforts and a fantastic conference!

Underlying the technical program of the 2025 CDC is a review process that provides certification of the scientific content of the conference. A few statistics on this review process are: 6,341 reviews for the 1,656 invited and regular papers were collected and evaluated by the CSS Conference Editorial Board, which consisted of 252 members and was chaired by Amir Agdham – many thanks to Amir and the entire CEB. An additional 1,732 reviews for 539 papers were obtained by the Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) for manuscripts that were submitted simultaneously to the conference and the journal, thanks to the L-CSS Editor-in-Chief Laura Menini and the associated Editorial Board. These numbers represent just one part of the 64th CDC that testifies to the depth and commitment of the CSS community of volunteers. Thank you to all the reviewers and editors!

With much gratefulness to and tremendous pride in the CDC 2025 community, I hereby welcome you to the 64th CDC in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and wish you an amazing and inspiring conference.