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2020 European Control Conference (ECC)
Dear Colleagues and Guests,Let me express my sincere thanks to the participants of the 18th European Control Conference (ECC2020) held on May 12-15, 2020 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The European Control Conferences are aimed at bringing together a wide variety of specialists in the Systems and Control fields with the purpose to show the latest developments in the respective areas, to exchange experience and to stimulate further interaction. It i s the first time when the European Control Conference, one of the major control conferences worldwide comes to Russia and I am happy to welcome our distinguished guests being virtually in Saint Petersburg: my native city, my favorite city and one of the most beautiful cities in the world, former capital and a historical scientific center of Russia. This conference is a very unusual one. During overwhelming COVID-19 outbreak many of international events were cancelled or postponed till 2021. Our decision was to organize ECC2020 as a fully virtual conference, since we really did not know (and still do not know) when this force majeure situation is finished. We hope to organize other major conferences in future in order to provide our fellow colleagues with more opportunities to visit Saint Petersburg. Of course, it is a bad news that many of you who were eager to visit our beautiful city were not able to do so during May, 2020. However, a good news is that the contributed and invited papers you prepared will be published in the prestigious database IEEEXplore and will then be submitted for indexation in Web of Science and Scopus databases. Besides all the papers and extended abstracts of your fellow colleagues included into the ECC2020 program were available online for you as early as ECC2020 opens. I am happy to say that 358 papers from 49 countries are included into the final program and this is a very good result given all the circumstances. The ECC’20 papers represent the front edge of our field. The organizers have done their best to create a friendly online atmosphere for work and rest, encourage new personal contacts and exchange of ideas. The virtual participants were provided with opportunities to attend virtual guided tours over Saint Petersburg and its museums. There was the virtual banquet with real awards and in the end of the conference there was a virtual farewell reception with the possibility to share the impressions about ECC’20 and thoughts about present and future of Control with their colleagues and friends. There were eight virtual round tables in eight virtual conference rooms corresponding to eight conference tracks. The style of that reception was B.Y.O.B. – “Buy Your Own Beer/Beverages”. There were 374 registered participants from 45 countries and more than 30 guests and I I know than many participants enjoyed this unusual new format of ECC. I know that a number of conference Organizers plan to use our experience in organizing a virtual conference – the 1st Virtual ECC I would like to thank all the organizers, IPC and CEB members and all who helped us to prepare this conference. My special thanks to 18 young volonteur moderators – two for each of nine tracks who organized the reliable work of all tracks of ECC2020. I wish health and every success to all during this not easy time.
On behalf of the ECC 2020 Committees Alexander Fradkov ECC 2020 General Chair
