Somebody attracted my attention today that ACM Membernet Europe in its last issue, has written about me in the section "feature ACM European distinguished speaker". In fact, several months ago somebody from ACM approached me to ask what is the meaning for me of being recognized as ACM Distinguished Speaker,
The truth is that I intended to use this program to tour some exotic places in the universe, but did not have time yet to pursue it, thus I answered that my action after this recognition is to coach and mentor young people about presentation skills. Indeed I have added to courses and seminars I am teaching a pitch about presentations (I am a fan of Steve Jobs' style of presentation), while this is a "soft skill", it is very important in today's world, as the picture above shows - sometimes more than what you say. In Israel we have a tendency to underestimate it, and believe that good content will sell itself, this is also true on product packaging. While some people are naturally good presenters, presentation skills is something that can be learned, and it is very rewarding to see young people catching quickly and producing great presentations (last week a students in a seminar I supervise did very creative presentations).
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.
