On Dynamic M2M Event Processing

M2M is one of the realizations of the Internet of Things which attracts a lot of work recently.  Event Processing is in the core of such applications. They don't work in the traditional Internet model of - store and search, but they are intended to alert or act now.     
An interesting presentation from Eclipse Con 2014 (planned for March 2014) is entitled "On  Dynamic M2M Event Processing".  This presentation (marked as a draft) is  by  Hitachi and Oracle.    It talks about event processing within remote devices embedded within   the OSGi component model.  Worth reading -- and we'll see a lot more in this direction. 

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.  
  

On robots for the elderly

I have always been fascinated by the potential of combination of event processing and robotics, and have written about it before, as well as followed some work in this area.   Recently I have read some material about EU project called ROBOT-ERA,  which is aimed at providing robot's support for the elderly.  Their plan is to create three type of robots for the elderly, which they call - domestic (for the room/apartment), condominium (for the bigger house/ home for the aged), and outdoor, with communication between the three types.  This system is obviously event-driven, but as many of the applications of the world it does not use COTS of event processing, but home-built solutions.    I think that while the event processing community concentrated in the COTS, it should also pay attention to help those who role their own --- I'll write more about it.

I also think that there is a huge  potential of smart systems and robots to help the elderly which sometimes the world looks to them very challenging,   Besides the EU projects there are other activities in this area in Japan, and Australia (watch this video). I assume there are others as well.  When such technology will become pervasive and affordable, it will have a significant impact on quality of life of elderly people.