Fifth IFAC Workshop on Time-Delay Systems September 8-10, 2004 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

From September 8. to September 10. 2004, the Fifth IFAC Workshop on Time-Delay Systems was held in Leuven, Belgium. This workshop fits in a series of workshops on the interplay between delay and control organized under the flag of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). Previous workshops in this series were held in Grenoble, Ancona, Santa-Fe and Rocquencourt. This year about about 60 researchers in the broad field of time-delay systems were brought together in the historical town of Leuven.

The workshop took place in the Convent of Chievres, one of the historical houses in the Great Beguinage of Leuven (Groot Begijnhof in Dutch). The Great Beguinage of Leuven is one of the best preserved beguinages in the world and declared as UNESCO World Heritage Site. The beautiful environment in combination with the excellent weather and the good meals made this workshop very enjoyable.

Group photo taken at the Fifth IFAC Workshop on Time-Delay Systems, September 2004.

The scientific programme was equally attractive: This three-day workshop consisted of 3 plenary lectures and more than 40 presentations, organized in a number of minisymposia. The themes of the talks ranged from the theory of automatic control to applications and numerical methods. By keeping the scope broad, the organizers aimed at stimulating the interaction between different disciplines. They certainly succeeded in bringing together people with different backgrounds in a friendly atmosphere that encourages collaboration. This made the workshop very interesting to all participants. Many thanks to the organizers, Wim Michiels and Dirk Roose.