Social Events

Beside technical innovations, IFAC World Congresses also stand for socializing with colleagues and friends at exceptional places. While the cyberspace can be regarded as such an exceptional place, maintaining the social character for a virtual conference is not straightforward. Hence, we are proud that many of you participated in the following social events.

Photomosaic Souvenir

We created the souvenir below of the IFAC World Congress 2020 by combining pictures from more than 220 attendees in one photomosaic showing the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Among the beautiful and creative pictures, you'll find 29 with beer coasters advertising the IFAC World Congress in Berlin. These beer coasters were handed out during the previous World Congress in Toulouse and they promised a free beer. The social events committee selected six exceptional pictures with and without beer coasters. All contributors of the selected pictures receive a poster print of the photomosaic. In addition, we will send some typical German beer to the contributors of the three pictures with beer coaster.


First perfomances of the IFAC Control Orchestra

The IFAC World Congress 2020 featured two performances of the first IFAC Control Orchestra! Originally, the idea was to present a live performance with musicians only from our community on site in Berlin. As the conference now took place virtually, this idea has been shifted to a remote fashion. More precisely, more than 25 contributing musicians played and recorded their parts separately, and all musical contributions have been combined into two masterpieces that were presented at the virtual opening and closing ceremony of the congress. You can watch these performances again below.


Control-and-the-Universe Quiz

Inspired by pub quizzes and game shows like “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” and “Family Feud”, we conducted an entertaining online Control-and-the-Universe Quiz with a mix of control-related and general questions. The quiz was held on Monday, July 13. In order to stimulate social interactions, interested quizzers were randomly assigned to teams with 3 to 5 players. Participants had to deal with questions like the favorite theorem of the IFAC technical committee chairs or the solar system’s tallest mountain (without using a search engine). After almost three hours of intensive online quizzing, the Control-and-the-Universe Quiz ended with happy faces: More than 130 quizzers from around the world had competed in around 40 teams!

The final ranks and the points of all teams are shown in table below. Congratulations to all participants and, in particular, to the three winning teams with the following members:

The_Team_of_Three: Devyani Varshney (IIT Bombay), Hanane Katir (Univ. Hassan II of Casablanca), Frank A. (Univ. of S. ;-))
DelToHu: Hassan HossinNia (TU Delft), Hideaki Ishii (Tokyo Tech), Julio J. C. Mancera (Univ. of Huelva)
Control freaks: Thierry Guerra (Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France), Suad Krilasevic (TU Delft), Leif Erik (NTNU), Jens Müller, Yannik Löhr, Oliver Berner (all Ruhr-Univ. Bochum)

Rank Team Points
1 The_Team_of_Three 83
2 DelToHu 80
3 Control freaks 79
4 ControlX 77
4 Dania Magna 77
4 Team no. 10 77
4 Team 18 77
8 Team Brain 76
8 JAVS 76
10 HussaM 75
10 The Kalman Filters 75
12 The Pharaohs 74
13 team40 73
14 Ali and the Gang 70
15 Who cares 69
15 P2L2 69
15 DEPT 69
15 InControl 69
19 Cool MPC folks 68
19 Team30 68
Rank Team Points
19 Luis and the Germans 68
22 Covid Strangers 67
22 The Predictors 67
24 The control avengers  63
25 GENIGR 61
25 Group37 61
27 WonderfulGroup 59
27 control_from_all_over_the_world 59
29 3D-PID Controller 58
30 MoZaf 56
31 C G T 55
32 Matthias' guys 51
33 4Unicorns 49
34 ML Ambassadors 45
34 404 members not found 45
34 EAN 45
37 IFAC-2GirlsGroup 44
38 South Japan 43
39 The Mics 42

The IFAC Control Orchestra

The 21st IFAC World Congress featured the first performance ever by the IFAC Control Orchestra. The Grand Opening Ceremony included a performance of "For a lifetime", based on "Ein Leben lang" by the Swiss group Fäaschtbänkler. Moreover, the Closing Ceremony featured a performance of "Smoke on the water", based on the original song by Deep Purple. Both songs were conducted by Jochen M. Rieber. We thank the following musicians for their performance:

Simon Bachler bass clarinet
Maria Domenica Di Benedetto piano
Julian Berberich guitar
Franco Blanchini violin
Patrizio Colaneri flute
Ian Craig cello
Darius Djafari-Rouhani violin
Arthur Scolari Fagundes guitar
Thomas Gellrich cello
Nykolay Gerashchenko clarinet
Giuseppe Gillini guitar, bass guitar
Michael Hertneck clarinet
Anne Koch piano
Paul Kotyczka violin
Steffen Leonhardt percussion
Masahiro Mae double bass
Manuel Alberto Martínez Arenas alto sax
Miguel Mauricio Iglesias cello
Mirko Mazzoleni guitar, tenor sax
Matthias A. Müller trumpet
Simon Muntwiler tenor sax
Martin Pfeifer bass guitar
Jochen M. Rieber clarinet
Arash Shahbakhsh tanbour
Alia Strandt clarinet
Julia Wagner alto sax
Julian Wanner violin

Arranger, audio engineering: Jochen M. Rieber
Organization, video engineering: Julian Berberich