Singularity is getting nearer -- a controlled cockroach

In DEBS 2012 I participated in the "Gong Show" and presented a short presentation about event processing as part of the singularity vision (key to immortality).   Today, thanks to Rainer von Ammon, I noticed a cool project called RoboRoach, that is seeking crowdfunding.   There is a short video demonstrating its work.  In essence the cockroach has implant that based on BlueTooth controlled commands creates false sensing for the insect which effects its behavior.    We may say that the natural event processing system of the insect is modified by feeding false events.     The claim is that this technology can have implications on overcoming human neural and sensor handicaps.   Note that on the webpage describing it there is a keen discussion of comments with various types of rejections on moral grounds.   I am not joining this criticism, I think this is amazing scientific achievement with a potential to change life as we know them.   I keep tracking singularity related news.

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.   

Sensors as actuators

Phil Windley, the CTO of Kyntex, has reported recently in his Blog about "talking back to a thermostat".  Phil has constructed a thermostat as event producer,  The example he talks about is changing the display color, however one can think on even more meaningful actions like turning on and off the air-condition.  The thinking of sensors as vehicles for human awareness is not enough,  in our universe, there will be more sensors than people, and especially much more sensors than people who are able to look at sensor reading treat is as data (small or big) and make sense of this data.  We are more and more move to era of autonomic computing, the Mars rover "curiosity" is largely autonomic, since the speed of light barrier creates a time delay that makes it virtually impossible for remote control.   We'll see more and more sensors who will also serve as actuators, or smart sensors directly talking with smart actuators (e.g. thermostat to the air-condition

controller).    The required event processing  (filter, aggregation,  maybe even patterns that takes into consideration other sensors' input, like presence of people in the house)  can be distributed between the smart sensor and the smart actuators without any middleware.    More on embedded event processing - later.  
  

The Fear Index

This morning I have finished reading "THE FEAR INDEX" by Robert Harris, who is known for his ancient Rome novels.  This time he has a "science fiction" that happens in the present coupled with a thriller.  It concentrates around hedge fund that uses AI for algorithmic trading,  and succeeds to crash the market and make a  huge earning by trading in short.   It is inspired by the 2010 flash crash.  


As I am a big fan of autonomic computing and  it utilization in daily life and in the business world, I often encounter people who have concerns about computers making decisions, and computers taking over.  Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark wrote the famous plot for the  film of "2001 space odyssey" in which the spaceship computer took over, the computer name was HAL, which is backwardly-removed one letter from IBM.    Some science fiction writers like Asimov also have a vision that computers (in this case android robots) will take over the world, but Asimov considers it as a good property,  since he was not a big fan of the human race.


I am not sure we are close to computers taking over the world, but autonomic systems should be constructed with self-monitoring that can be visible.  This is something that we'll be exploring (among other things) within new proposed project we are doing with many partners.   

On human inability to make real-time decision

WW2, besides all the bad things it did to humanity, also accelerated thinking and technology in many areas, Winston Churchill's war room has advanced the methodology and practice of real-time decision making.  There are today many decision support systems that help decision makers to make quick decisions, however, Chris Webber from the Economist Intelligent Unit (EIU), who was one of the speakers in the Progress Software conference last week said that their studies show that the obstacle for getting quick decisions is the human decision maker that has difficulty to get quick decisions even if all information and decision support tools are available for that decision.    Maybe, in some circumstances, the human decision maker can be skipped and be replaced by an autonomic system that will be fed with goals and intentions and will make the actual decisions?    

More on Decison Management

Today is the last day of the 8 days holiday, and tomorrow - back to the office (well for one day only, since our weekend in Israel is Friday and Saturday, and Sunday is a regular working day), and I have a huge "to do" list that keeps accumulating, and a bunch of phone calls... Today, however, I have travelled with my family to Bet She'an, one of the biggest archaeological sites in Israel (around 70 KM from Haifa). The roman city was exposed and much of it has survived, as you can see in the picture above (there is much more).

Today - just a short posting as a follow up on James Taylor's posting, who is advocating for a while the notion of decision management. The following slide is copied from JT's posting and explains the difference between decision management and decision support




The difference, as shown, is between helping people to make manual decisions, which is the BI land, and make automated decisions, which is the DM land. One of the topics I am working on recently is the notion of "decision" as an abstraction which should be programmed directly by business users, and will hide a blend of technologies such as: BRMS, event processing and various kind of analytics; I believe that the next wave of computing will be centered around the ability to business users (or direct consumers) to program and the role of IT will be replaced by autonomic computing techniques -- we are not there, but this is something to expire. Event processing will play multiple roles in this setting, but I'll leave this discussion for another time -- it is late, and I want to advance in the book I am reading since tomorrow will be busy..

On performanc metrics and the new coffee machine

Morning, in my office with the morning coffee and the Blog... In this building the coffee machines are gradually being replaced with new ones. The new machine produces somewhat better coffee, but noticeably slower. This tie back to one of the topics that I am working on recently - performance metrics for event processing networks. From the coffee machine I can learn that people are ready to switch one property (speed) with another property (quality), which, of course, indicates that performance metrics typically does not consist of a single property. Even the dimension themselves are tricky, in previous posting I have indicated that defining latency in event processing network may have multiple interpretations, besides this we can look at minimizing the average latency, or minimizing the maximal latency. This is not identical -- "real time Java" implementation which smooth the garbage collection functions are making the maximal latency much lower, but there is a price in average latency (try and observe)... The autonomic computing principle of self-optimization applied on event processing network given multiple criteria is one of the major challenges of the next generation of event processing implementations. This is an evolving thinking, so more thoughts on: WHAT are the optimization parts and HOW they can be optimized -- in later posts.