especially the first issue, cannot adequately indicate the scope or the nature of the material it may include. As stated in the editorial and in the preceding articles, it is intended that a wide variety of subjects should be included to illustrate the activities of IFAC and developments in all aspects of the control field. Actually, the latter has often been the goal of other journals, but for one reason or another they usually become rather specialized. However, this journal, because of its relationship to IFAC, will feature papers from a wide variety of countries and IFAC meetings often devoted to only one control specialty. Thus the basic supply of papers will come from sources of varied character and interest, and by publishing reports of IFAC meetings as well as some of the presented papers, this journal will attempt to provide communication between various areas of interest in the control field.
Because the number of papers presented at IFAC meetings each year is generally too large to permit publication of all of them in this journal, only certain papers will be selected for possible publication through a reviewing process. Consequently, some IFAC meeting papers may eventually appear in other journals after consent has been given to the authors to do so, and if appropriate acknowledgement is given.
Of course, the publication of only a few symposium papers will generally not provide an adequate perspective of the event, the various viewpoints, topics, and activities which actually occurred. To provide this information, brief reports about the meetings will be included wherever possible. As an illustration, this issue has discussions of IFAC symposia held in Israel and in Budapest. In fact, there are two reports pertaining to the Budapest symposium: one based on its organization and purpose, and the other on a major technical theme of the symposium pertaining to computing techniques and devices in control systems. Some of the interesting papers discussed at the symposium were selected, with the cooperative assistance of T. Vamos and J. Hatvany, of the Hungary National Technical Committee, for further evaluation by associate editors. A few of these papers were selected for this issue, after recommended revisions had been made, with a note that all of the papers presented at the symposium