Welcome to the 2007 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'07) in the beautiful and historical city of Istanbul. This is a 3 day symposium enriched with a workshop the day before and vehicle demonstrations the day after. The symposium brings together researchers from industry and universities to discuss research and applications for Intelligent Vehicles and Intelligent Infrastructures. The symposium is unique in being a single session symposium where all participants can easily meet and discuss topics of interest in an informal atmosphere. Furthermore participants get exposed to different but related topics within the area of intelligent vehicles without having to go from one session to another. The popularity of the Intelligent Vehicle Symposiums however let to far more submissions of papers than can be presented in single oral presentation sessions during the 3 day period. Poster sessions are established to give a chance to many more papers to be discussed and presented to interested audience. These poster sessions are also single session events and are held between the oral presentation sessions, thus preserving the single session nature of the symposium. The selection of papers for oral and poster sessions has not been easy. The number of paper submissions was 241. The number of accepted papers who made it to the program is 216. Out of 216 papers 51 papers were selected for oral presentation and the rest were distributed to poster sessions. The 241 papers were handled by a number of Associate Editors who solicited reviews from different experts in the field. I like to thank all of them for their efforts to help complete the review process under very tight time constraints.

The review process ratings were used to make decisions regarding acceptance of papers for oral or poster presentation. I apologize to the authors who were very disappointed that their papers did not make it to the oral presentation sessions. I received emotional emails from several authors expressing disappointment and disbelieve that their papers were ‘downgraded’ to poster session papers. Unfortunately the usual poster sessions in most conferences consist of very downgraded papers creating the perception that this also true for IV’07. I have to stress that for IV’07 this is not the case. I am sure many poster papers are of high quality and if space was available or if time constraints allowed a more thorough review process the allocation between oral and poster would have been different. I have to also stress that a 20 minute oral presentation of a paper may not necessarily have the same exposure as an hour long presentation to an interested audience in a poster session which is also a single session event. If we put such disappointments aside all authors and participants will find the structure and organization of the symposium very rewarding from the research and educational point of view.

The technical program of the symposium is rich with papers from different areas of Intelligent Vehicles contributed by researchers from Universities, research centers, industry and government with authors from all over the world. The participants will find the nature of the symposium very beneficial and the quality of papers whether they are part of oral or poster sessions very high.

I would like again to welcome everyone to IV’07 and wish each one of you a pleasant stay in Istanbul, many fruitful research discussions and a safe trip back home.

Petros Ioannou

Technical Program Chair