Prediction Is Very Difficult, Especially About the Future.

I am writing this column in early December, prior to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Florence, but after the IEEE Technical Activity Board (TAB) meeting in New Jersey and the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Executive Committee meeting that was held in Stutt-gart. Amid all this travel, I have been contemplating reoccurring themes at the TAB and CSS meetings, both this year and in the past. One important theme relates to technology change and its potential impact on the future of CSS. Another is why our numerous volunteers work so hard for their professional Society. I teach a first-year course on electrical engineering careers. The final lecture includes a discussion of the technology changes over the last quarter century. For example, music storage and delivery has transitioned significantly: vinyl records, cassettes, eight tracks, portable cassette players , portable CD players, MP3 players, iPods, streaming media. For beginning engineering students, as they start their careers, contemplating their potential contributions to technologically changing fields is an exciting prospect. However, for their future employers, such technology change holds both risk due to obsolescence and reward from new product sales. Similarly, technology has significantly changed CSS conference and journal operations over the last few decades. Conference papers were previously hand prepared on oversized mats, delivered by postal services to a printer, reduced in size, and bound by the printer into multivolume sets over a foot thick that were shipped to the conference and carried back to home institutions for later reading. Now papers are submitted in final form as pdf files, automatically checked for format and plagiarism, and distributed electronically via IEEE Xplore or a tiny (and easily carried) memory stick. Similar changes have affected journal operations and the review process for both journals and conferences. This same time frame has seen the development of new, versatile, and inexpensive means to share software, data, movies of experimental results, and lectures. These developments positively affect the rate and impact of our theoretical, algorithmic, and implementation research developments. Thankfully, due to the thoughtful leadership of the CSS, our conferences, transactions, and magazine all have both high-quality technical content and the sound financial foundation that enables their continuity. Due to the value that it provides, CSS membership is growing and becoming more international. Members of the CSS Executive Committee end a process control tour in Stuttgart, Germany.