The ACC technical program starts every day with a plenary or semi-plenary presentations. The program continues with regular, invited, and tutorial sessions in parallel. Pre-conference workshops, special sessions, and exhibits will complement the paper presentations.

The technical program can be found at https://css.paperplaza.net/conferences/conferences/2013ACC/program/ .

Best Presentation of the Session awardee list. Note: some sessions are not listed if the Session Chair(s) did not indicate any presenter for the Best Presentation of the Session Award on the Session Forms they were asked to complete.

TECHNICAL PROGRAM OVERVIEW

In addition to the three themes of societal challenges, smart health care, and sustainability, presentations in the 2013 ACC address control topics from automotive systems, to biomedical systems, to online ad systems. Theoretical advances in adaptive control, nonlinear control, optimal control, and many other areas will also be presented. We received 1864 paper submissions as well as proposals for 29 invited sessions, and record numbers of tutorials and workshops. The entire Program Committee worked hard at selecting 1137 papers that will be presented in 22 parallel sessions across the three days. Many thanks go to the society review chairs, associate editors, and the program committee members for handling this very large number of papers in a short amount of time. Special thanks go to Dawn Tilbury (Program Chair, 2012 and General Chair, 2014), Linda Bushnell (Program Chair, 2007), and eight dedicated volunteers from the program committee for completing the review audit in record time. Of course, there would be no reviews to audit without the work of the reviewers who helped ensure the high quality of the accepted papers. To them, and most of all, to the authors and session organizers who submitted excellent papers and sessions to the ACC, go our thanks. Without them, we wouldn't have a conference.

Each of the three themes will be highlighted with a semi-plenary presentation, followed by tutorial, invited, and contributed sessions on related topics. On Monday morning, Xi-Ren Cao will present the Societal Challenges for Control Keynote while Paul Torcellini will present the Sustainability Keynote. On Tuesday morning, Markus Fromherz will present the Smart Healthcare Systems Keynote and Jason Marden (the 2012 Eckman Award Winner) will present a semi-plenary lecture on game theory and its relationship to multi-agent coordination. Wednesday morning, Maarten Steinbuch will present a Plenary Lecture on advanced motion control. The first ever ACC Public Lecture will be given on Monday evening by David Mindell, on how humans and society interact with robots, feedback loops, and autonomous systems. Even our main social event, an evening just for ACC 2013 participants and their guests at the National Air and Space Museum, will have a technical component. Beyond all the examples of air and space control systems, we will have as our guest of honor, Carlene Stephens, the curator and creator of the newest exhibit, Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There.

As the Program Chair, I was fortunate to work with a group of dedicated Vice-Chairs who helped create the technical program – both within and outside of the three main conference days. Our ACC boasts 13 pre-conference workshops on Saturday and Sunday, June 15-16, a set recruited and evaluated by a small group of the OpCom led by Linda Bushnell (Vice Chair for Workshops). Katie Johnson (Vice Chair for Invited Sessions) worked tirelessly with the program committee to select the 27 invited sessions. As Vice Chair for Industry Activities, Haitham Hindi worked with the individual tutorial session organizers to generate a record number of 12 tutorial sessions on topics as varied as wind power, cancer treatment, airborne test platforms, optical phase-locked loops for frequency control, and online ad systems. L.K. Mestha, Vice Chair for Special Sessions, helped coordinate the lunchtime special sessions where participants can (for example) learn about software synthesis, learn about funding resources, or learn about expanding control science to the study of human behavior.

No modern ACC can happen without the miracle that is PaperPlaza and the behind-the-curtain work of its two gurus: Alessandro Astolfi and Pradeep Misra. I am particularly indebted to Alessandro for his ceaseless effort and commitment to the quality of the ACC that led him to fill in gaps whenever one of us did not know what we should be doing. I am extremely grateful to my management at Agilent Laboratories for allowing me to contribute to the controls community in this way. Finally, I want to thank my very good friend, Lucy Pao, who asked me along from the start to help her plan this event, and has provided me with both amazing autonomy and guidance throughout this process.

And now – as Groucho Marx would say – on with the conference!

Danny Abramovitch
Program Chair, 2013 American Control Conference