Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) conducted every year by the Control Systems Society (CSS) of the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the oldest major conference on automatic control. It dates back to the First Symposium on Adaptive Processes held in 1962 in USA. Its popularity is explained by its high scientific level, quick publication of reports (three month after the last revision), and it is traditionally held in December, as a rule, at sites with warm climate. In the opinion of the Past and Present Chairmen of the Society [1], CDC is a historical rendezvous for the members of the Control Systems Society. where they can meet and know about latest advances, and where the sessions of the Council of Directors are held. It is here the Bode lectures are read, prizes are awarded, and Fellows of the Society are elected. The 43rd CDC was held in December 14–17, 2004 at the Atlantis Hotel, Nassau (The Bahamas) and sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Japanese Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and European Control Association (EUCA). C. Cassandros (Boston University) and W. Gong (Massachusetts University) chaired the Organizing and Program Committees, respectively. The program included 936 sectional reports carefully chosen from a total 1879 submitted reports, i.e., less than 50% of submitted reports were approved. Russia was represented by G. Kurin (Voronezh Forestry Engineering Academy), D. Efimov (Institute of Mechanical Engineering, St. Petersburg) and I. The Russian delegation was sponsored by the Control Systems Society. The Conference was held in honor of the 50th CSS Anniversary to trace the development of the Society and Conferences on Decision and Control, as well as to review the state-of-the-art in control as a whole. Without going into details, I would like to outline my impression on the conference, which, in my opinion, may be of interest to the readers. First I would like to say a few words as to how reports are selected. Selection is rather strict and based on reviews of full texts of reports. Therefore reports are of high level, probably, higher than that of IFAC World Congress, for which about 65–70% of submitted reports are approved (though the number of reports at the IFAC Congress is usually greater). Reports are reviewed by the Conference Editorial Board consisting of more than 100 expert editors from different countries appointed by the Council of Directors of the Society for several years. Editors work on honorary basis and are independent of the Program Committee. Every report is assigned a set of key words in accordance with the theme of the paper for the editor. The editor forwards the reports to few reviewers and submits an approval or a rejection recommendation to the Program Committee on the basis of the reviews from at least two independent reviewers. Since the conference is held annually, there is less than ten months between the last date of submission of reports (March 1) and date of commencement of the conference, and about five months for reviewing