Greetings from the AACC President |
On behalf of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC), I am pleased to welcome you to the 2020 American Control Conference (ACC) in Denver. ACC attracts participants from academia, industry, and government; from around the world; and, from a wide range of disciplines including all the engineering and control-relevant branches of applied mathematics. AACC is a federation of nine professional societies: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Society for Automation (ISA), the Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Applied Probability Society as a subdivision of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS APS). The mission of the AACC is to promote cooperation among the various segments of the automatic control profession within the U.S. and to represent the U.S. in international activities. To this end, AACC manages the ACCs, supports control-related workshops and symposia, represents the U.S. in the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), provides volunteers for IFAC activities, and undertakes other initiatives that promote and coordinate developments in the automatic control field. AACC was founded more than sixty years ago in 1957 and had its first organizational meeting that year in Chicago. Among the various AACC activities, the largest single activity is ACC organization, which begins about five years in advance. The American Control Conference has had two name changes in its history. The first conference - the National Automatic Control Conference – was held in 1959 in Dallas. The very next year the conference was renamed the Joint Automatic Control Conference, which ran until 1981. AACC decided to change the conference name to the American Control Conference during an operational change in which the conference went from being organized each year by one of its member societies (which would rotate among the societies) to being organized by an operating committee whose members are drawn from multiple societies. Each operating committee is led by a General Chair and a Program Chair. These positions as well as the operating committee members change each year. AACC is an organization led and run by volunteers. The governing body of the AACC is its Board of Directors. Each member society appoints one Board member. The Board provides overall governance of AACC and elects the Chairs of various committees, the ACC General and Program Chairs, and the Officers who are responsible for operations and recommendations to the Board. Each ACC is both a presentation of the latest research results in and a celebration of automatic control. In addition to the peer-reviewed papers in the conference proceedings, each ACC features workshops, special sessions, exhibits, and social events which include a banquet, opening and closing receptions, and the annual AACC Awards Ceremony. Please join me in thanking the General Chair Santosh Devasia, the operating and program committees, the AACC Board and Officers, and many others for their volunteer contributions. I extend my best wishes to all conference participants for an enjoyable, stimulating, and productive ACC.
Jay A. Farrell |