Research, a Never-Ending Story [President´s Message]

When I think back to my early days of research at the beginning of the 1980s, I observe how the field of control has evolved during a time span of almost 30 years. This evolution is evident when attending the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) over the years. Using IEEE Xplore and the old-fashioned hard copy proceedings, which are still available in the Electrical Engineering Library of my university, CDC sessions have been aggregated into several macro areas of research and then divided into ´theory-oriented´ and ´application oriented´ areas. Rather than showing results for each year, I include an average analysis consisting of periods of four years. This averaging avoids the presence of some spurious artificial peaks that I observed in some years. I start my analysis in 1982, which is the year I attended my first CDC in Orlando.