New interesting slideshare presentations: multimedia & big data and WS02 CEP

Looking at Slideshare, I cam across two new interesting presentations.

The first one by Ramesh Jain, entitled:  "multimedia & big data".  Ramesh used the analog of the "blind men trying to understand what is an elephant" that I also used before in another context, and says that we create silos by the different senses (and media), and discusses the integration of all events grasped by the different senses (and media) to create storytelling.   He discusses some of the challenges of situation modelling and detection in that environment.  The challenges and directions are certainly where I believe the world, and the value of big data are taking us.

The second presentation is by WS02, a Sri-Lanka based company, introducing their complex event processor    AKA Siddhi. This is presented in the context of big data and describes the architecture and the language.

On event semantics -- my talk in the event-based multimedia workshop

Still in Barcelona for the event-based multimedia workshop.   I still need to write on the second day and the closing panel (in which I also participated), and my impression about the event-based multimedia community.

Meanwhile -- I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare, parts of it is reuse of other presentation (e.g. the slides explaining the notion of context),  the new stuff is about the semantics -- who are the players in the event game.    I am planned to give a long tutorial on event modeling in ER 2013 next month - stay tuned. 

On actions and success criteria in event processing

I am now in Durham, North Carolina, the second stop in the USA business trip (that included 4th of July dinner with friends).   A reflection on one of the DEBS 2013 presentation given by Steffen Hausmann, a PhD student supervised by Francois Bry about "complex actions".   The model built specifies an action model for event processing.  The interesting insight is that unlike traditional systems where the success is determined by the successful completion of a task, event processing systems are goal-driven, an action goal is a reaction to some situation, and is intended to satisfy some goal with respect to this situation, for example: resolve a problem.   Thus in the presented model each action has success criterion that determines whether the action satisfied the goal.    In the presentation this criterion is an event, typically emitted by a sensor, but this can be generalized to a more comprehensive model.   The idea to define success criteria for actions as part of event processing system is very useful, and in a sense closes the loop of sense and respond.   

Our DEBS 2013 tutorial: why is event-driven thinking different than traditional thinking about computing?

The tutorial that Jeff Adkins and myself delivered in DEBS 2013 yesterday is now posted on slideshare.  

Many of the participants reacted with further discussions.  The first take away we wanted to convey is described on this slide.   While the community continues to work on advancing the technology (which is fine!), the main challenge today is not the technology,  but making the paradigm shift in people's mind about 

event-driven thinking.  Indeed, experience shows that a typical developer when facing with an application which we classify as event-driven would tend to implement it in a traditional way:  treat the events as data, store them in a database, and process them in request/response mode.   The tutorial discusses the differences and explains the ontology of event-based system as we see it.  It also has a short description of our recent work around the "Event Model", on which I'll write more in the future.  

More about DEBS 2013  --- soon. 

DEBS 2012 - our presentation on "basic proactive"

I have written before about the proactive event-driven paradigm that we are investigating in the last couple of years.   Today I have presented some new results in this area, the "basic proactive" model which provides end-to-end solution for a restricted type of applications with several characteristics.  The paper co-authors by Yagil Engel, Zohar Feldman and myself is in the proceedings (will probably be in the ACM digital library soon).   The presentation can be found on slideshare.

Since there has been a slight delay in the schedule, the session chair allowed only 2 questions, one by Alex Buchmann who wondered whether it is wise to introduce new buzzword  like proactive, or position it otherwise.  I think that there are pros and cons, but the buzzword is already there and I'll write about it.

Adrian Paschke, who is interested in the formal aspects, remarked that classical logic will not be sufficient here since conclusions are uncertain and can be retracted.  I answered that we'll probably need non-monotonic logic, maybe combined with some kind of quantitative logic of uncertainty (such as probabilistic logic).  If somebody want to take the challenge and work on the formal model -- let  me know.

More -later. 

My recent talk in ETH

I used a spoiler of the movie "Source Code" as the opening slide to my recent talk in ETH.   The presentation now is uploaded on slideshare.   Enjoy! 

New tutorial on event processing

Roland Stuhmher, whom you can see in the right-hand side of the picture, on the Jeopardy! set, in DEBS'11, has recently recorded a video piece giving a tutorial on event processing.  Some of the slides looks familiar to me (well, he mentioned my name is his slide about "attribution of the slides").   In the slides he mentions a term iCEP, which either means that Apple has a new CEP gadget in its i series.  BTW - according to Steve Jobs, the apple "i" (started with iMAC) stands for: Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform, Inspire -- all start with I...  So does any of them apply to iCEP?  Another possibility is, of course, intelligent (I have used the term IEP in the past). Anyway -  good tutorial, with some glance of the ETALIS project developed in FZI.  Enjoy!

Additional presentation - talking about AI and EP

To complete the presentations list -- another interesting presentation from RuleML'11 (the first out of two) by 
Alex Artikis and Nenad Stojanovic  talking about AI approaches to situation detection and remaining challenges.

Some EP related slides and videos on the Web

With the help of Google Alerts, I have found some recent presentations that relate to relatively old staff, but has some interest nevertheless.


Surprisingly, somebody posted a presentation about RFID/ event processing panel in the first EPTS symposium in March 2006, relatively old staff but interesting even today. 


A video describing the CICS event system has been posted on the IBM Education Assistance server.  This is a system that instruments CICS to act as event producer that was released in 2009.  


A presentation by Informatica on "Data Governance". where event processing is one of the enabling technologies. 


Last, but not least. an academic presentation from INRIA with the interesting title "undoing event driven adaptation of business processes". The terminology here is somewhat weird, but it relates to the retraction issue, and proposes the use of EP for doing that.


There are also some presentations from DEBS 2011, on the DEBS website, hope that more presentations will be posted. 

Briefing a USA federal committee

In this picture you can see me and a tiger during my family vacation in Thailand, in 2007.
Today I met another TIGER - the standing committee for Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate & Review which is a committee of the USA National Academics that works on behalf of the USA intelligence community. 

I am still unsure how they picked me up, but they invited me to participate in a meeting with the committee members and some other participants through video conference and brief them on the state of the practice, my vision for event processing in 2020, and the challenges on the way to get there.  This is an indication that event processing has caught the attention of  defense sector as well.    The vision part talked about the Event Fabric devised as the grand challenge in the Dagstuhl event processing seminar,  published as chapter 5 in the event processing manifesto (BTW - in DEBS 2011 there will be a tutorial about this grand challenge). 
Another topic was of course, the proactive world, my favorite topic.  


I was asked what is the killer application that will drive the 2020 vision, and said there is no single killer application, there are multiple of them, and I see many of them outside the corporate IT domain, such as autonomic robots and computing embedded in biological systems.   Of course, defense applications will also be part of the driving forces.    More on this topics -- later

OMG event processing symposium - replay is available now

For those who missed the original broadcast of the event processing symposium - a replay is now available. My presentation entitled "event processing - seven years from now" (Brenda Michelson asked me to talk about "event processing in 2015", but I thought that 2017 is safer...) is now on Slideshare. I am just listening to myself now, it is quite strange to hear your own voice and realize your English accent is somewhat strange. Enjoy!

More on Web 2.0 and Event Processing

This is a model of the Haifa City hall - as seen in the Mini-Israel park, the best place to see all the interesting sights in Israel if you have only 1 hour to spare... While last week the elections in the USA have been a big story, we have this week a smaller story -- electing mayor, there are nine people who want to be mayors of Haifa, and today in lunch we discussed what we know on some of them... no conclusions yet, will decide in the last minute, as always.

The Internet plays now a role in elections, including the Web 2.0 - Blogs, social networks etc.. which become part of the life. I have already written about the impact of Blogs, this week I was asked to look at IBM response to RFP that has been identified by the relevant people to be copied from some Blog entry (not mine); it seems that what's written in Blogs start to impact decision making. Social networks are also very visible. In 2006 Mark Palmer sent me an invitation to link in linkedin today I have 517 connections (when one passes the 500, it shows as 500+, I guess a kind of honor...), since then I've lost track at the number of social networks I got invitations to join (and joined), the most famous is of course facebook, which I joined to see pictures that my daughter is posting them and serves as a major means of communication between members of her generation, but there are at least half a dozen more social networks that keep sending me requests and messages from time to time.

Today I have discovered "slideshare" - a slide sharing network, and found out that Tim Bass has created a slideshare group of "complex event processing". I think this as excellent idea, and added also some slides there to see if there will be any interest. Slideshare can also be linked to linkedin, so linkedin members can also view it in my linkedin profile.

BTW - for those who missed the EPTS 4th event processing symposium - or wish to view it again - the professional part of the meeting has been recorded and now can be found on the Web in the CITT site
Thanks to Thomas Ertlmaier who worked hard both on the photographing and the editing, and to Rainer von Ammon for the initiative and sponsoring of this effort.