Visiting Cambridge

Today I am in Birmingham, England. Yesterday I have visited Cambridge University for a few hours and gave a presentation about "event processing - the next generation", second time out of the four times I am going to give this presentation in various places this week. Cambridge has a relatively large research group called Opera, directed by Jean Bacon and Ken Moody, which deals with event-based middleware (among other things). Jean is also the "grandmother" of Apama, since John Bates has been her Ph.D. student. Apama still maintains a site in Cambridge, and some of the Apama guys came to hear my talk. While there were some periods that I did other things and had looser connections with the research community, I have returned last year to a scientist position, and am trying to keep closer contact with the research community, by visits, collaboration, and helping in the organization of DEBS as the flagship research conference in the event-based computing area. Later today I'll be visiting Aston University here in Birmingham, where my good friend, colleague, and mentor, Robert Berry, has taken recently a position of Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which I'll meet later today.

BTW -- for some reason I cannot get to the IBM VPN from here, probably something in security setting of the local Internet server, so anybody that contacted me by Email may have to wait until later this week.