Serving as Program Chair for the 2009 American Control Conference, I have come to fully appreciate the service of the volunteers who come through time and again to make this conference possible. Specifically, the authors, the reviewers, the Program and Operating Committees, the CSS Conference Editorial Board, the Society Review Chairs, the session chairs/co-chairs, and the organizers of invited/tutorial/workshops deserve the credit for the technical quality of this conference. Thank you!
The ACC-09 technical program comprises 29 invited sessions, 5 tutorial sessions, and 129 contributed sessions in lecture format. We received a total of 1,418 submissions, which is an increase of just over 10% from last year. For inclusion in the final program, we accepted 68% of these papers. This resulted in 19 parallel sessions on the first day and 18 parallel sessions on the second and third days (except for the late afternoon session on the third day, which was reduced to 16 parallel sessions.)
In terms of the individual societies and regular contributed papers, we accepted 41/60 papers from AIAA, 26/36 papers from AIChE, 2/2 from ASCE, 69/103 papers from ASME, 544/800 papers from IEEE, 81/154 papers from ISA, and 9/15 papers from SCS. Also, we accepted 154/192 papers of the invited papers.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Thomas Parisini and Pradeep Misra for their support as the PaperPlaza “gurus”, as well as for putting up with my inexperience. Also, I am grateful to our general chair, Karlene Hoo, for keeping me pointed in the right direction, and to our local arrangements chair Shirley Dyke for taking care of the myriad hassles of getting all the meeting rooms set up with audio visual equipment, etc. for the conference.
I welcome you all to the 2009 American Control Conference and hope you find it to be intellectually stimulating and enjoyable as well!
John Chiasson
2009 ACC Program Chair