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.  

More on detection of human sentiments

There are several works that attempt to use social networks to detect human sentiments.  In a recent article, John Bates (Progress Software CTO and one of the founding fathers of the event processing discipline and community) reacts to some claims that using Twitter one can predicts trends in the stock market with high accuracy.   While the article deals with stock market applications, I'll give some comments  within a broader context of detecting human sentiments in any domain.  I'll  quote John's claims in italics and different color and mine in this font and color.


John states three problems with that assumption:

1. Social networks are not secure, thus the results may not be accurate, and may also be malicious or just wrong.  His example is that somebody twits about the fact that USA started a war on France. If somebody uses it to effect the stock investment, or even travel plans, the results may not be that good. I agree that this is a major issue.
2. Social networks are unlikely to contribute anything that is not being disclosed in mainstream news. I am not sure that I totally agree with this one,  sometimes individuals on twitter or facebook reveal news before the mainstream media detect it, we saw some examples recently all over the world.
3. The time it takes to process the sentiments may make the results obsolete, since the reality may move faster. I guess that it might be true in some cases, but with real-time analytics, it may be good enough in other cases. 

Overall, the first problem stated is the most serious one.  Perhaps when there will be some validation mechanism to social networks postings, then it can be more reliable.  One may claim that if we can assume that most posts on social networks are correct, then there can be noise removal filter.  But still social networks may not be reliable sources (BTW - mainstream media news may not be accurate either!).


It should be noted that I've learned about John's article since he twitted about it on Twitter.  So maybe the fact he wrote this article by itself is not accurate?     More on this -later.

1000 contacts in LinkedIn

Today, two more connections were added to my LinkedIn contacts list, and the number of contacts went up from 998 to 1000,  the 1000th contact is my IBM Haifa Research Lab colleague, Ran Ettinger.    LinkedIn is the social network in which I have most contacts, I also have twitter account followed by 236, and Facebook account with 96 friends, there are also some more social networks I am registered in somehow, but I am not active in any of them.


Among the 1000 members of the contact list 331 are (or have been at some point) IBM employees,   the two other high-tech companies with most contacts are: Google (16) and Microsoft (10),    There are also some contacts from my second universe, the academic world:  Technion (29) followed by Tel-Aviv University (8).
Some are friends and classmates from high-school,    Out of the 1000,  423 live in Israel,  131 in the Greater NY area,  69 from the SFO Bay area, and 46 from the UK, and then from many other countries in all continents.    I am also registered in about 40 LinkedIn groups -- from Temple University alumni, to the Haifa high-tech community,  and of course all event processing related groups, and many others.   


I have never asked anybody to recommend me on LinkedIn,  one person did in response to the fact that I've recommended him.  I have recommended six persons at their request, but never knew whether it is effective.


That's enough statistics for today.  

Revisiting Web 2.0 and event processing

To those who like interesting numbers -- I've noticed this week that the number of my contacts in LinkedIn reached 777, it will probably not stay long, as it keeps changing. I have written before about the use of event processing in social networks, an area that I think has big potential that has not been fully explored yet. I have challenged the students in my event processing class at the Technion to select a project that is somehow related to the use of event processing in Web 2.0, and social networks in particular.

I have written before that unlike the phrase, event processing is not always about threats and opportunities. In fact, typically in Web 2.0 the use of event processing is in information dissemination - getting the right information to the right person at the right granularity in the right time. This is a case of situation awareness while the situation here is the fact that some website content has been changed, or that some activity related to social network, Blog, Wiki, and other collaborative applications happened. This can have any of the event processing functions --- filtering seems to be quite dominant, but also transformation - aggregation, translations, splitting all have a role, and of course pattern matching may also have a significant role -- example: send me update after three changes, patterns related to number of readers in a Blog (Google Analytics provides some), patterns related to activities in social networks over time and space, patterns related to tags in twitter and more... I think we'll hear much more about this topic.

On social networks and event processing

Today I noticed that the number of my LinkedIn contacts is now a round number 0f 600, unfortunately two of these 600, Klaus Ditrtich and Shlomit Zak have passed away, but their LinkedIn records are still alive, I hope that the rest of the 598 are alive and well. I was introduced to LinkedIn 3 or 4 years ago, when I received a LinkedIn invitation from Mark Palmer, who was my first contact, and accumulated the rest of the links over the years. Part of them invited me, and part of them were invited by me, I have there classmates from high school, colleagues from all places I worked in, students I taught or supervised, some friends, and of course, the members of the event processing community. LinkedIn was my first social network, currently I even don't know exactly how many social networks I am member of, but LinkedIn is the only one that I am active in. So I'll take this opportunity to say a few things about how event processing can become part of social network platforms.

There is a lot of buzz recently about Twitter events, which is also one of the Web 2.0 family, but I'll take the LinkedIn example now, since it has some structure, which creates various event types. While there is applications that attempt to use Twitter events to get information about the stock market, in social networks the events are about individuals; some of the interesting event patterns that may be obtained about individuals:

• A person got more than 3 recommendation during the last week -- probably looking for a job now, this is an information that can be of interest for various people, such as head hunters, or enterprises seeking for employees.
• A certain amount of contacts joined a certain group -- may be an indication about a group of interest
• LinkedIn has microblogging of 14o characters like Twitter -- various things can be obtained from this microblogging.
• Postings that people make on groups may indicate something about a person.
• Level of activity in groups may also indicate something about that group.

Many other possibilities can be thought on; I foresee that event processing will be embedded in social network platforms, and maybe will be the basis of abilities to offer paid services. Some social networks send me an Email every time that somebody looks at my profile, and offer me to know the identity of this person, if I'll become a paying member, I have never tempted to do it, however, maybe the use of event processing will provide such services that will be worth paying for, but I guess that most people expect to get these kind of services for free... Can be a good exercise for students, to build such a service. That's all for today, almost midnight...

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.

On Web 2.0 and Event Processing

One of the questions that I heard recently is - how does "web 2.o" relates to "event processing" - or vice versa. Well - today everything has to fit with anything else. So here are some wild ideas:

• Mashup - kind of fusion of content from different sources, this content is being updated as result of processing events.
• Social networks -- a lot of things can be learned from tracing events in social networks, examples: a person has accumulated at least 5 recommendations recently -- is probably looking for a job; if a person changes his/her affiliation more than twice a year may also be of interest; one of the social networks sends me birthday alerts...
• Blogs - besides the fact that there are Blogs about event processing, there can be events related to Blogs - patterns over content of Blogs, over relations among Blogs, and over readers of the Blog.

There are, of course, more - these are just a sample; event processing can be useful in the investigation of collaboration systems. For example - The informal structure of an organization can be discovered by analyzing collaboration systems. This topic deserves more attention.

Talking about event processing Blogs -- I would like to welcome Colin Clark to the event processing Blog sphere.