The potential dark side of the Internet of Things

Thanks to Rainer von Ammon who attracted my attention to an article entitled "Murder by Internet",  that points out some of the dangers of connecting everything to the Internet,  some of them such as manipulating pacemakers and controlling vehicles from remote may result in using the Internet for murder, and commit various crimes that will be difficult to detect.   Security of such systems will become crucial!  Event processing can also be used as enabling technology for such security, but cyber crimes pose challenges that law enforcement today is not ready to handle.  

The Internet of Things in practice

I came across a post in the "smarter planet blog" entitled "The Internet of Things start to bear fruits" by Paul Brody,  it claims that the "Internet of Things" vision is beginning to be in reality, and that the major enabling factor is the availability of low cost scalable connectivity.  The data transfer cost is below $1 for GB.  

It surveys some initiatives like: Raspberry Pi, Sensordone, and the Nokia initiative to become the "where company".

Event processing is one of the ingredients of the Internet of Things, and on this space,  Brody mentions IFTTT (If this than that).  Note that I have written recently about ON{X} which is of similar flavor to IFTTT.

S4 vs. Storm

Yesterday I wrote about a talk given by a person from Yahoo Labs!  Another piece from Yahoo Labs! is a comparison between S4 (the author participated in the development of S4)  and Storm   acquired by Twitter.    Interesting!   Note that S4 and Storm are not the only players in the area of distributed stream processing, there are some others like IBM Infosphere Streams, so a more comprehensive survey should not be limited to these two. 

An event-driven approach for the separation of concerns

Today we hosted Hayim Makabee from Yahoo! Labs who gave a talked entitled "An event-driven approach for the separation of concerns".  In the talk Hayim discussed his approach to implement separation of concerns through event-driven programming, and contrasted it with aspect oriented programming.

The talk can be found on slideshare.   Interesting.

Note that I have written a few times about the relationship between event processing and separation of concerns, in the context of contexts, and in the context of  using SQL for event processing. 

Reflection on blogging in 2012

The year 2012 is going to expire today,  this has been the first year since 1985 that I have not visited the USA (I have been several times in Europe, though), somehow I don't think this will be true for 2013.

Looking at this Blog,  I had less posts this year (this is post 92nd for the year, the record year was 2009 with  162), but the flow of readers was bigger this year than the previous years,  I recently  came across an article in HBR Blog entitled "If you're serious about ideas, get serious about blogging".   

Looking at the popularity test,  the most read post this year was entitled the pilot decision making process,  which shows that the mental thinking of a pilot is situation driven.  One of the main areas that I have investigated this year is how to make people think in a situation driven way when coming to IT systems, which are dominated by the request-response thinking.   

Another popular post was   not about event processing but the one dealt with the question: Is computer science a science or engineering?   This question was triggered by the fact that my daughter Daphna participated in a science day in the high school she was going to attend (and is attending now) and it seems that while this school has computer science major, it does not regard it as a science.    My opinion is that computer science is neither science or engineering but a thing of its own.

Additional ones are again a more generic post on presentation skills.  This is a  soft skill that I think is extremely important in today's world.  I am putting emphasis in all the courses and seminars I am teaching, my source of inspiration, as I have written is Steve Jobs style of presentation.

Several popular professional posts: 

  On temporal extensions to  SQL 2011.      I am following temporal databases for many years, and the eventual extension to SQL is long overdue.   

On event server as the 21st century application server - following Paul Vincent,  I think we are seeing this shift happens.

Last but not least of the popular post was my review of Dave Maier's keynote in DEBS 2012, where I observed that the fragmentation in research make even distinguished researchers to reinvent wheels.

Let's see what blogging topic will be interesting in 2013 -- happy new year.