DEBS 2014 - the first two days

The picture was taken at the entrance to the computer science building in IIT Bombay where the DEBS 2014 conference is being held.  This is my first visit to India, and it is certainly different from anyplace else I've seen, I'll write about my impressions from India after I'll return.

The first day of the conference is the day of tutorials and PhD students section.   I have already written about my tutorial,  on the second half of the day Nenad Stojanovic delivered a tutorial about event processing on 

 mobile devices, following the start-up he is engaging in now. 

The second day started with the first keynote of Minos Garofalakis who talked about the work on reducing communication cost in stream processing by geometric reasoning.  I am familiar with this work that is done in collaboration with the Technion. Minos presented communication as the most scare resource that need to be optimized, but in answer to my question he admitted that this is only one of multiple factors that affect the performance.   

Other interesting talks were the one by Alessandro Margara about learning event processing rules.  The talk was interesting and his results look good,  however his work is restricted to very specific patterns and also to a derived event that is observable.   Many of the derived events are virtual, and the relationships between events that issue the pattern, and also the different dimensions of context, make it difficult in general to use machine learning techniques to automatically generate rules, and I think it is still largely an open issue.

Beate Ottenwälder gave a talk about reuse of patterns for optimization purpose.  This might be useful in some cases (where there are overlaps between patterns). 

 In the beginning of the day the organizers presented some statistics about countries from where the submissions sent from, and for accepted papers.   Not surprisingly, Germany is the largest country of activities in this area - both in submission and acceptance.  This year the acceptance rate was 9%, the lowest ever for the conference.  The organizers also presented some metrics about citations of the conference that are coming close to the major conferences and journals in the distributed computing area. 

More on DEBS 2014 - later.