RTInsights online magazine: the April 2013 issue is out

After some delay, the current issue of the RT Insights online magazine is on the air.  

This issue consists of four  interesting articles in the four themes of the magazine:

Business Strategies:Chris Taylor, of TIBCO Software, shows readers how Caesars Entertainment keeps track of thousands of customers at over 50 casinos and hotels with CEP, collecting data on each customer's behaviors and transactions to personalize customer experiences and reward big-spending and loyal customers in real time.

Frontline:  Nenad Stojanovic, PhD, of the Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe, explains a leading edge approach to personalizing content called Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R) which adapts content in real-time to each individual's behavioral cues.

Tools and Tactics:Chris Bird, Principal Consultant at MomentumSI and one of the most experienced practitioners in event processing , explains the uses of both in-stream and out-of-band models for event detection in the analysis of ongoing transactions

On the Horizon:Published author Phil Windley, PhD and CTO at Kynetx,  discusses the coming of the "trillion-node networks" of computing devices and programmable chips embedded into every conceivable product and device (known as "Internet of Things"), thus adding intelligence and automation to even the simplest tasks 

You can freely download this issue from the RTInsights website.  Hope you'll find it useful, and looking forward to your feedback (on behalf of the editorial board and the publisher).   

On malicious event sources: the Twitter Hoax case

In case anyone missed it -- the Twitter Hoax occurred last week.  The story is that a Twitter message occurs at 1:08 pm, that was sent on behalf of Associated Press, notifying on two explosions in the white house, and the injury of the USA president Obama.  Since there are automatic trading programs who get their decisions based (among other sources) on social media, and AP is considered a reliable source, the figure above (taken from Wall Street Journal) shows what happened to the Dow Jones.  The Tweet, of course, was not sent by AP, it was hacked.   Within 2 minutes denials started to arrive, and around 1:13 the Dow Jones got back to where it was 5 minutes earlier.   Regulators are now checking what they can do about such incidents, as reported today by the NY Times.    While writing three years ago about the benefits of Twitter as event source, I noted the danger of abuse.  

Actually when relying on events, the danger of abuse and hacking exist anywhere, one can abuse medical events and sabotage health systems, one can abuse traffic events and make the roads messy, and I guess that there are many other creative way to abuse life.  Yet, I don't think that going backwards and ignore incoming information is practical.    In fact we made malicious sources as one of the motivation of dealing with uncertainty in event processing, but this area is still young.    This struggle will continue to evolve as one of the challenges of big data.