Sunday, December 7, 2008 in Cancun Mexico

It is wonderful to be here in Cancun with all of you to celebrate and honor Bill’s many accomplishments. Welcome!

This Symposium is to honor Bill Wolovich, who is turning 70 (ish) this year. Bill has contributed to many research areas including Multivariable Control, Robotics, Computer Vision and this event covers all of these and more. As you know Bill retired from Brown University a few years back, in 2001, but he continues teaching Brown’s freshman engineering course. A detailed description of Bill’s career and extensive accomplishments may be found in the article at the end of the Book of Abstracts.

Planning for the symposium has been very rewarding as it gave us the opportunity to revive old friendships and start new ones. We decided to have this Symposium just before the 2008 CDC in a warm place, at the beach in Cancun. The alternative was to have it on the campus of Brown University, a fine location, but at the end we opted for the more exotic destination. Steve and I are the symposium organizers, general chairs, program chairs, and chairs for local arrangements, registration, publicity, publications and finance. We have put together a strong technical program and we believe an interesting social program as well.

We would like to thank the 2008 CDC organizing committee, particularly Chaouki Abdallah, the General Chair, and Rafael Sandoval, the Local Arrangements Chair, for their continuous help and enthusiastic support.

Our special thanks go to you, the participants, for making this Symposium possible and we hope, memorable.

Welcome and thank you!

Panos Antsaklis & Steve Morse

University of Notre Dame & Yale University

Sponsored by: The H.Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Endowed Chair of Engineering of the University of Notre Dame.