58 sensor applications

I came across a site that lists "top 50 sensor applications for the smarter world".  It actually list 58 applications partitioned to the following areas::  smart cities, smart environment, smart water, smart metering, security & emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, smart agriculture, smart animal farming, domestic & home automation, and eHealth.  

I worth digging into the different areas to check the potential applications, and the role of event processing in each of them. 

The Internet of Things in practice

I came across a post in the "smarter planet blog" entitled "The Internet of Things start to bear fruits" by Paul Brody,  it claims that the "Internet of Things" vision is beginning to be in reality, and that the major enabling factor is the availability of low cost scalable connectivity.  The data transfer cost is below $1 for GB.  

It surveys some initiatives like: Raspberry Pi, Sensordone, and the Nokia initiative to become the "where company".

Event processing is one of the ingredients of the Internet of Things, and on this space,  Brody mentions IFTTT (If this than that).  Note that I have written recently about ON{X} which is of similar flavor to IFTTT.

While you have slept - more about the big brother

Back to Chris Taylor's - this time he wrote a guest blog in the Forbes blog entitled "While you slept" dealing with issues of privacy.   I have written before about the big brother aspect on using sensors within the smarter planet. This is other aspect -- a lot of information are flowing on us from various systems, social networks, and various systems.   A smart program can look at what we published in blogs, twitter, facebook and others and determine on our political opinions, religious beliefs and others.  It seems that the combination of sensors, activities on social media, and other systems make us give us our privacy and many people don't seem to be bothered -- they allow everybody to see their pictures on facebook, or read what they write there.  There are people who report in Twitter on what they are doing 30 times a day including all their happy and frustrating minutes.  It seems that there is a growing section of the population who are giving up their privacy from their own will, and other people who are not aware that their privacy is been invaded.   I guess that this is one of the characteristics of the current web generation - losing privacy.   Of course, event processing can help in drawing conclusions  about a person.   Chris ends his posting in call for companies to be aware and set up policies and strategy and for government to regulate.  

On Adaptive services

Chameleon is an adaptive animal, it can adapt it color to the environment. In the next few weeks my main task will be to complete a proposal for EU project that deals with adaptive services. I have (mistakenly?) agreed to coordinate a consortium that creates a proposal. We had a meeting in Trento following the EPTS event processing symposium. EU project has a benefit of getting funding for research that can explore more advanced topics then can be funded by commercial corporates, and also provide an opportunity to collaborate with some very good people both in industry and academia. The down side is that there should be much investment in the proposal, since it became extremely competitive.

The proposal is about the idea of adaptive services -- which means in plain words that the behavior of the system should be adapted to (unexpected?) events. This adaptation may require human interaction (e.g. modifying medical treatment protocols), or self-adaptation (e.g. change of emergency handling protocol on the fly). The research challenges here are in area of event processing -- having more advanced features that are beyond the state-of-the-art; adaptation, modeling and methodology of how to build such systems. More about this topic - later.

On the smarter planet and the big brother

An interesting comment to my previous posting on smart cities, said as follows:


Even if I am a big supporter of event based systems, I have a question on this topic. Can you explain me, who is the owner of the event based routing, filtering integration services?

I hope, that you do not think about weather the government, or some industrial companies, cause this would empower them to rule the world.

There need to be a self organizing way like e.g. the Internet, but getting there will be even a larger competition than introducing the web, because of already competing companies in that market segment.

I have written before on the big brother when talking about the previous NY governor whose felling out of power began when a computer program indicated him as suspicious in money laundering. This reminds my of somebody who told me that he is afraid that information is gathered in computerized systems and used for other purposes, that person lived in NY, and moved at some point to live with his girl-friend in New Jersey. He did not want to change his NY address for various reasons (among them not to bother changing his driver licence). He said that he never used EZPASS to pay for toll roads, since somebody could conclude from the fact that he drives every working day in the "garden state parkway" northbound, that he actually lives in NJ.

So the question is -- using all the smarter planet services will have the possibility to gather much information about the individual, who owns this information and what can this information be used to. Governments typically do not own infrastructures, but they have powers to make laws that will compel infrastructure owners to provide information, they do it today. Actually Internet service providers has a potential to know a lot about us. The same goes for events, if we'll have smarter planets, there will be a lot of events about individual person floating around, and if somebody will be able to join events from various sources, this somebody have a potential to know much about us. I guess that here there will be a need to have some legal structure that will prevent infrastructure suppliers as well as governments to abuse this information, like the bank secrecy laws in Switzerland.

On the vision for smarter cities

The IBM Institute of Business Value has recently published its vision of smarter cities, which is part of the "Smarter Planet" vision on which I have written before. As noted before, the smarter planet vision is based on the fact that the world will be instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Event processing is the backbone of smarter cities. As smarter cities is been labeled "system of systems", the integration and communication between the different systems is done using events, and the event processing filters, transforms and routes the event among systems. It also crates derived events from one or more systems that may be used by other systems. Event processing technologies have two roles: In the macro level, it is a glue between the systems and is part of the intelligent part of each individual system. I'll write more about some individual systems inside the system of systems. I am trying to get a smarter cities keynote talk in the 5th EPTS event processing symposium --- stay tuned, details about the symposium (Trento, September 21-23) are coming soon.

On Smarter Planet

Still in Las Vegas. The icon above is the logo of IBM smarter planet, which is the main theme of the IMPACT conference. According to IBM, the smarter planet is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Event Processing is considered in all talks a key enabler. In the conference there has been a distribution of a mini-book, which includes the first few chapters from the upcoming book of Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte. Sandy Carter, IBM VP for Websphere marketing, has written a preface to this mini book, here is a quote: We at IBM are excited about event processing. As the planet becomes increasingly instrumented, interconnected , and intelligent, event processing is emerging as a key technology for mitigating risk, seizing opportunities, and achieving greater corporate agility. Smart cities, smart healthcare, some retail... these are just a few areas where event processing is adding more intelligent technology to our life. Under the smarter planet imitative there are vertical solutions, and today I went to listen to a talk by Honda Italy about smart manufacturing. Interesting stuff, more - later

On IMPACT 2009 - the first day

Las Vegas. I have arrived here yesterday to participate and give a talk (twice) in the IMPACT conference, IMPACT is the annual conference that IBM is holding for its customers, especially the Websphere brand, but also covers anything that is defined under the "SOA portfolio". James Taylor is reporting about it, and is doing much better work than I can do, so trace his Blog for more details, however I wanted to bring my personal angle into it. The first day started in a plenary session with a huge, besides a very funny performance of Billy Crystal, who put three IBM executives on the podium to do sound effects to a story he told, there have been presentations of the senior executives of IBM Software Group, Steve Mills and Tom Rosamillia on the main theme of this year's conference: Smarter planet. When I heard the presentation I could not help smiling to myself, practically all customer examples that have been described under "smarter planet" have included event processing component in a key role. One of the customer examples has been the one described by my colleague Guy Sharon in the 4th EPTS event processing symposium, about tracing people in industrial facility to verify authorization of people to be in a certain place accompanied or unaccompanied, since the customer was exposed in public, I can mention it has been British Petroleum, this is something that the IBM Haifa event processing team has been heavily involved in creating this application. Some more applications in different industries have also been presented. Event Processing is being used far beyond its early adopter, the financial markets industry. I view it both inside and outside IBM that people who have been somewhat skeptic about event processing 2-3 years ago, talk differently about it now. Actually, the interest will yield more investments and advance this area to cope with the various challenges, but this is another story.

The main business value that event processing is achieving, according to IBM studies, is business agility. A study done reveals that in today's environment, almost all CEO are trying to re-think and change their business processes, and often software is an obstacle. Event processing is considered as an enabler for such agility. I always believed (and wrote about it several times) that the main business value is agility and not high performance that is required by a certain segment of applications, while agility is required by many more... Reality has its own strange ways...

A comment about branding -- IBM decided more than a year ago to use the brand BEP (Business Event Processing) for the entire portfolio of capabilities in the various IBM products related to events, and not adopt theCEP acronym used widely in the industry . The idea has been to emphasize the "business user orientation". Anyway, I'll leave the branding discussion to the marketing guys -- the content is more important.

There are more than 20 sessions in the conference that talk about event processing from different angles -- from the business perspective, the technical perspective, various related products in IBM (e.g. enabling CICS applications to serve as producer and consumer of event processing), my own session later this week deals with the future, but I'll Blog about it at later time, it is late, and I need some rest, getting up early every day for some conference calls...