The International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology is by far the longest standing conference on security in the world. It has been held in venues all over the world, every year, since and including, 1967. We celebrated the 47th conference in Medellín, Colombia last year. Only a few of us on the Executive Committee have been associated with the Carnahan Conference since its inception. The background history of the conference is always set out in the first few pages of the proceedings so we give only a potted summary here. It all started in Lexington, Kentucky in the USA. The name 'Carnahan' comes from the Carnahan House, which was the University of Kentucky's conference centre. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson launched his so called 'war on crime'. Professor Robert Cosgriff, Chairman of the University of Kentucky's Department of Engineering, decided to respond to the President's 'war' by holding a conference on electronic crime countermeasures. It was a local meeting and, you are right, it was held at the Carnahan House, in fact, in the April of 1967. Although only a small gathering, the meeting was a measurable success and the following year was convened as a national, US wide event, sponsored by the Lexington Chapter of IEEE and the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society of the IEEE. These two sections of IEEE remained sponsors of the conference, and have played this role, right up to the present day. Ours was one of the IEEE's first forays into supporting technical conferences. The IEEE itself has existed only for only four years longer than us.
The Carnahan Conference soon became a popular international event. The first one outside the US was held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1973, followed, a few years later, by one in Oxford, England.
The next major milestone occurred in 1991 when Taiwan enthusiastically joined the Conference. The Chun Shan Institute of Science and Technology and the National Chiao-Tung University, both of Taipei, were warmly welcomed to the Executive Committee as permanent sponsors. In 2003, the National Central University replaced the Chiao-Tung University as sponsor. We feel honoured that the Taiwanese government chose our conference, from many others, to support and in which to play an active role.
The conference has also been held in Germany, Australia, Taiwan, Switzerland, The Czech Republic, Spain, including the Canary Islands, and Canada. Our conference in Boston last year was the 31st in the USA! Needless to say, most of those have been held in Lexington, Kentucky!
Like any self respecting conference, The Carnahan Conference has to have some social activities. Ours has a banquet, held usually at some spectacular venue away from the conference facility itself, a programme for the partners of the delegates and an annual golf tournament which Gordon Thomas and Jack Veatch initiated, actually at St Andrews, Scotland, in 1995.
The Carnahan Conference is overseen and managed by an Executive Committee which comprises twenty members from countries all over the world. The latest recruits are from the USA, Barcelona (Spain), Colombia and Italy which is the venue for our conference in 2014. Dr Gordon Thomas (UK) is the current chairman of the Executive Committee and General Chairman and Larry Sanson (US) is the immediate past chairman. Dr Dan Pritchard is the Deputy Chairman.
Well, that's a brief history which, we hope, gives you an idea of the nature and atmosphere of the conference!
Since 1999 our previous conferences have been held in:
