Ninth IEEE international conference on automation science and engineering [society news]

The ninth annual IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE), sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), was successfully held 17-21 August 2013 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Under the theme of "Automation in Practice," topics in the conference touched a wide spectrum of automation: fundamental theory, scheduling and optimization, manufacturing and supply chain, informatics, and emerging topics such as: civil and building automation, health-care automation, energy systems, and networked systems. In the current year, we had over 300 attendees and a record number of 322 submissions from 29 countries. In addition to regular paper submissions, we solicited presentationonly submissions to permit authors to present particularly new developmental or application work. The final program included 193 papers and 28 presentation-only contributions. (Table 1 indicates the awards presented at the conference.) We would like to sincerely thank the contributions of all the participants as the general chair and program chair of the IEEE CASE 2013.