Foreword [General Chairman's welcome]

This is the General Chairman's Welcome to the Twenty-Third IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the annual meeting of the IEEE Control Systems Society. The CDC is held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and, for the first time, with the Operations Research Society of America. This is a CDC with many distinctions: It is the first to be held in Las Vegas; it is the largest in terms of technical sessions and contributed and invited papers; and it is the IEEE Centennial year CDC. The operating and program committees have made every effort to make this an interesting conference.