On event processing grand challenges

This is the logo of the "Grand Challenges SIG" of the UK Electronic design knowledge transfer network. In the 4th Event Processing Symposium last year, Arkady Godin from MITRE, proposed in the business meeting to launch a work group that will deal with grand challenges in event processing. The EPTS steering committee decided that such a workgroup may be premature, and it is better to complete some work in the other workgroups -- languages, architecture, use cases, interoprability, in order to have a better understanding of the grand challenges, however, this issue has neither forgotten nor forsaken. We determined that the best forum to discuss the grand challenges is the (second) Dagstuhl seminar on event processing, which I'll co-organized with Rainer von Ammon and Mani Chandy, we also asked to invite all people that we saw as the right set of people to participate in such an event (if you have not been invited and think you would like to contribute, please let me know, there is a waiting list for available slots if any, no promises though).

In the coming 5th event processing symposium in Trento, we shall hold the first brainstorming about grand challenges. Pending technical feasibility (still requires confirmation from local organizers) we plan to do this as a public session that all EPTS members will be able to use through audio conference call, EPTS members will get full details with call-in numbers when it will be finalized.

Grand challenges can be in multiple areas and also refer to multiple addressees. There are grand challenges that will require a community effort, and these challenges should be picked up by EPTS, some challenges are to advance the state-of-the-art, and this will be addressed to the research community, with some creative incentives. Some will be referred to the product vendors, and may be some to other adjacent communities.

Idea for such grand challenges are solicited from various sources:

• EPTS workgroups that already are active, each workgroup will be asked to contribute a challenge in its area
• The reach-out sessions for other communities in the symposium (the BPM community and the the IT management community) might also lead to some challenges
• The research community is always a source for such challenges
• Last but not least -- all EPTS members (and other interested people that wish to contribute, and thus are hopefully future EPTS members), specifically customers who has long-term vision about their systems, like our MITRE colleagues who started this discussion, and our analysts colleagues who have cross-vendor and cross-customer perspective.
  
  Anybody who wishes to contribute ideas to this session, please let me know by the end of this week.

I'll wrap-up this posting, by pointing out a Blog entry I have seen just now, written by Niels, who runs a consultancy company called "SQL Develop" as its name testifies deals with DB related issues. The upcoming Microsoft product "StreamInsight" has raised the interest in the database community, as Microsoft seems to take an SQL oriented approach to its product, and Niels is blogging about "CEP resources" he covers Blogs in this area, on my Blog he writes: THE blog about CEP, if you were to read only one blog about CEP, this is it! First, thanks to Niels for the endorsement, I don't view the Blogging area as a competition, as people who read Blog tend to read multiple Blogs, and it is also kind of a network of Blogs that sometimes react to each other. To be fair, also most Blogs in this area are marketing oriented Blogs, that they have somewhat different motivation from my Blog, and one cannot compare. Anyway, a good way to start the day.