On ACM Distinguished Speaker Program

Today the ACM Distinguished Speaker program announced my inclusion in the list of "ACM Distinguished Speakers".   The program is described in the ACM DSP site,  while this is a big honor, especially looking at list of speakers that include some real giants,  it is not a recognition program, but a program that has a mission stated as:  The DSP is an outreach program if ACM that brings distinguished speakers from academia, industry and government to give presentations to ACM chapters, members and the greater IT community. 


The outreach mission means that by accepting the nomination to ACM Distinguished Speaker, I commit to 
travel and give talks by request of local ACM chapters worldwide, there are some ground rules that can be found on the site,  e.g. to justify international travel (fully funded by ACM) there should be an accumulated audience of 300 people, so it typically entails multiple talks during a single trip.     I am in the opinion that I should spend some of my time in sharing knowledge with the greater community, this is the reason I am teaching, providing long tutorials in various conferences, and wrote (together with Peter Niblett) the book "Event Processing in Action".    Thus, accepting this nomination is another link in the chain, and I'll try to do my best to satisfy requests, especially from places in the world which don't get a lot of talks on the event processing area.


My speaker page shows four proposed talks, three of them deal in event processing:

•  A short tutorial that serves as introduction to event processing -- summarizing the material in the EPIA book.
• A talk about the research challenges that exist and a "call for action" to the research community in a way to move the event processing area towards its next generations
• A talk about proactive computing, one of the extension directions of event processing, on which I concentrate recently.

The fourth talk is on more general theme:   Computer Science Research in Industry -- some history and different models of how it operates.


I hope that it will be both useful to the audience and fun.