On DEBS 2009 - next week

Tomorrow night I am planned to start the long way to Nashville, to attend the DEBS 2009 conference. DEBS is originally a conference founded by the distributed computing guys, what is known as the "pub/sub" community. Two years ago, Mani Chandy and myself came to the DEBS steering committee and challenged them to extend the conference such as it will be a general event processing conference, and work with them to make it the scientific "flagship" conference of event processing. Looking at the DEBS technical program, the first day (Monday) is the tutorials day. It will have six tutorials, five of them are about event processing, and two out of the five were created by EPTS work groups: the use case work and the language analysis work group. Giving part of this tutorial (the other parts will be given by Jon Riecke and Adrian Paschke) will be my first role in this conference. We shall make these tutorials available to the public after the presentation. The second day (Tuesday) will start with a keynote address by John Bates, Apama GM, and one of the pioneers of the event processing area. He will be the industrial keynote speakers, and as chair of the industry track, I will have the honor of introducing him, my second role in this conference. The first research session on distributed event processing will have a paper which I co-authored on stratified approach for supporting high throughput event processing applications, however, I will leave the presentation to the younger generation (Geetika Lakshmanan from IBM Watson Research Center will give this talk). The second research session will be about pub/sub, but one of the talks has the event processing phrase in the name. Then we'll have the industrial session, and my third role will be to chair it. This session will consist of four industry report, and industrial panel about academic-industry collaboration in event processing. We plan to have four panelists, two from academia, one customer, and one vendor, and discussion with participation of the audience. DEBS originally was almost purely academic conference, but we have injected some the industrial participation, and believe this partnership is important for both sides, and more important, for the future of the event processing area. In the DEBS business meeting, later that evening, I plan to propose hosting DEBS 2011 in Israel. The third day, Wednesday, will have a keynote talk of Alex Buchmann, an old colleague from the active database era, who is one of the DEBS founders. The research session of that day will deal with complex event processing, and in the afternoon - posters, demos and fast abstracts. The fast abstract session is now a trend in conference to enable people to have short reports about work in progress, not mature enough to have full papers. My fourth role in the conference will be to give a short talk about a work in progress we are doing in the area of geopsatial and spatiotemporal extensions for event processing language.
The last day (Thursday) will feature another keynote talk by Karsten Schwan, and three research sessions about variety of topics. I'll have to skip the last day, since I'll have to go for some meetings in the NY area on Thursday and Friday. I'll report more about DEBS 2009 later, looking forward to meet a lot of colleagues from the developing community.