The "Professional Briefs" are a new venture by IFAC, started late 2000, when IFAC TC Chairs were invited by Peter Fleming, Chair of IFAC Publication Committee, to suggest a list of topics and associated contributors. These Professional Briefs would aim at a readership of general professional control engineers (industrial and academic), rather than specialist researchers. Topics would, typically, provide an introduction and overview of a "hot topic", illustrative results and sketch of the underlying theory, with special attention given to providing information sources such as useful internet sites, books, papers, etc.

The development of the Professional Briefs series was discussed by the Council at its meeting in Arlington, VA, USA, during the 2001 American Control Conference. The Council was planning for the first Briefs in the series to be produced for access via the IFAC Website and launched at the World Congress in Barcelona, July 2002. It was also decided to establish a Task Force acting as an Editorial Board for the Professional Briefs, the purpose of which was to monitor the development of the project, evaluate and approve the first set of proposals to be included before the XVth IFAC Congress and review the content of the contributions to be posted on the IFAC Webpage. The editorial group consists of:

- Pedro Albertos
- Jozsef Bokor
- Alfons Crespo
- Peter Fleming
- Abraham Haddad
- Rolf Isermann
- Jaehyun Park
- Marek Zaremba - Chair

Since the Professional Briefs series will be an on-going IFAC effort to reach out to control professionals and regularly introduce new topics, prospective authors are strongly encouraged to submit their proposals for contributions on other potential Professional Brief titles. These proposals should be emailed to Prof. Marek Zaremba (zaremba@uqah.uquebec.ca).

List of Professional Briefs