After returning from a business trip, and a few days family vacation to celebrate the Purim holiday, I am retrurning to the Blog. One of my loyal readers, Eran Toch, has suggested the topic of this posting by sending me an article saying that the former NY governor, Mr. Spitzer, has started his way down of his high office, when caught by a "anti money laundering" program that looked for simple pattern of three events. Well - this is a classic event processing pattern, and it seems that it has changed the life of a few people (starting from Eliot Spitzer himself, and in a chain effect, many other people). This reminds me of a visit that a group of Eurpoean journalists visited the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel in 2003 or 2004, and I was asked to give them a talk about CEP (I am not sure even if we already used this name) - after giving them some example of use cases, all of a sudden one of the journalists had the association to Orwell's big brother, and after he mentioned it, there was some philosophical debate between some of the journalists to us, whether this technology has a potential to be a nightmare for human rights. My opinion is that many technologies can be abused, but can also used for good causes - criminals (and auditors) can use patterns to find flows in systems, and organizations can use similar patterns in order to trace the same criminals that are trying to take advantage of flows... No matter how used -- event patterns is very powerfull, and its impact on our life has not even scratched the surface of its potential.
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