50 Years of the Power Electronics (Ee) Symposium in Serbia (1973 - 2023)

Power Electronics in Serbia has passed rapid development in the last 50 years. It was the result of collaboration and synergy between academicians, top researchers from scientific institutes, academia, and industry in Serbia (former Yugoslavia), but also of enthusiasm and devotion of research teams all over the country. The conference started in Belgrade in 1973, followed by several major research and power electronics industry centers of Yugoslavia (Sarajevo, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Subotica), while finally sited in Novi Sad in 1995, with Prof. Vladimir Katić, as the conference chair. Today, it is a symposium, fully international, technically cosponsored by the IEEE and several other European societies with all papers included in the IEEE Xplore digital library and cited in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. In this paper, a short history of the Power Electronics conferences/symposiums, with a review of its statistics, and a discussion of its significance and impact to the Serbian and international power electronics community is presented. It is also compared to three other scientific meetings and concluded that it is well-positioned and has a good international reputation among similar regional conferences.