Abstract :
December 2011, the society celebrated the 50th anniversary of our flagship annual event - the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control??known to most of us as "the CDC." During the 1960s, it was actually called the IEEE Symposium on Adaptive Processes, and the first time that it took place as IEEE Conference on Decision and Control was in 1971. The author decided to take a quick look at past CDC programs and proceedings to get a better sense of how specific topics emerged and flourished and how interest in them evolved through the years. As he did so, he observed some trends, many of them predictable, others a little surprising. He eventually decided to collect some real data to quantify his observations, which has led to the main content of this column.
