Reviewing project for the European Commission

Dortmund, Germany.     Morning -- packing to start the way home.
In the last couple of days I have participated as a reviewer in two reviews of  EU projects which are centered around event processing -- Play (in Brussels) and Pronto (here in the fire fighters instruction center).   Play is in his first year,  building infrastructure for  "events marketplace",  Pronto in its third (and last) year, deals with events that arrive from multi-media sources, you can read some details about them on their websites.   Getting more event processing centered projects funded by government agencies is an indication of the growing importance of this area.    Got some interesting observations out of these reviews, which I'll write about later.

Some catching up

Have not written for the last week,  spent some of it in the IBM La Gaude site, near Nice, in South France, the La Gaude site is on mountain and can be seen in a bird eye's view here.    The meeting was an internal meeting of "technical leaders" (whatever it is) in IBM South and West Europe, and was kind of educational and networking session.    Back home - occupied by some family matters, so now I found some time to catch up.    First looking at the Blogland,  one can find two old bloggers returning after long silence, one of them is Brian Connell,  who returned to blogging after a long time, the other is Marco from Rulecore, who also returned to blogging after a long silence.  In a comment to my Blog,  the Rulecore guys are wondering why Rulecore is not mentioned in the ACM Computing Survey upcoming survey on event processing while other are mentioned.   I think that the reason is quite obvious, while I am familiar with Rulecore (they participated in the implementation of the EPIA example; my students used them in project several times),  if one wants to be known by the academic community, then one has to participate in the research oriented conferences, publish (at least industrial) papers etc --- in our world, visibility is the name of the game, so you might consider sending an industrial paper or experience report to DEBS 2011,  or participate in the DEBS 2011 challenge.    


Another blog (Jason Irwin's)  that I don't typically follow provides a new review of the EPIA book.     


My next trip is planned for late March in the USA,  I was invited to give a tutorial on event processing as one of the highlights of the OMG Technical Conference,   I might also do some other meetings in the USA (customers' meeting, IBM meetings, university visits),  but still working on the plan.     

My 2010

In 2010 I have posted less entries in this blog, relative to 2008 and 2009, 128 postings, roughly once every three days. Maybe I've been busier, and maybe I've been lazier - probably the combination of these two. 

The happiest day of the year was surprisingly the day in August when I've returned from a family vacation in western Canada and found two things that got by mail:   

12 copies of the book EPIA that fresh out of press (I have already gave 10 of them as a present, left 2 for myself - one at home and one in the office); the EPIA book was a major task for 18 months, so I was relieved to see it in print, at some points it fell like never-ending saga. 

 

The second item that arrived it the same day is a plaque designating the fact that I've received an IBM corporate award, which is the highest award that IBM gives,  the order of the events was somewhat funny: first I got the plaque in the mail, two weeks later I got a letter signed by IBM's CEO, which notifying me that I am receiving the award, two weeks later than the list of awards was publicly published, and then after six more weeks there was the award granting ceremony, giving me again the plaque I got in August.

Another notable event was the Dagstuhl seminar on event processing in May 2010.   We are now in the final phase of editing the end result of this team work.  Dagstuhl is a wonderful place, and we had a very good team there spending  5 days in dealing with the present and future of event processing.

I had some trips abroad - both business and pleasure.   Unlike most years I spent only four days in the USA in October, for the OMG financial market conference,  spent two and half weeks in a family vacation in Western Canada,   here is a picture with my daughter Daphna somewhere in the Canadian Rockies.

Another trip was to VLDB in Singapore, with a couple of days vacation in Hong-Kong on the way, and several days vacation in Singapore.

Here is a picture from Hong-Kong's wax museum,  where I am photographed with an old friend.

Here are two pictures from Singapore, one from a zoo that resides in a rain-forest in the northern part of the island, and the second in a spa where you can get your feet cleaned by fish

Another conference I have participated in was DEBS 2010 in Cambridge, UK.

 This year I have also started the work on a new project that deals with proactive computing, and will write more about in in 2011.    

Overall --  interesting year,  the leaves a lot of unfinished challenges for the future.  

Visiting Temple University - 20 years after graduation

I have finished my PhD studies 20 years ago in Temple University in Philadelphia, and after many years I have visited my old school today, and gave a talk in the CIS department seminar.  It was interesting to meet again those faculty members who are there, and some new ones.  I was especially happy to meet my advisor, Giorgio Ingargiola,  who is about to retire at the end of this year.  Giorgio has been a great mentor on clear thinking, and  a major influencer on my own development, here is Giorgio's current picture.

I have some follow-ups, especially on the software engineering of event-based systems which I may have found a collaborator.    Giving a seminar I got some interesting questions, one of them about the gap between events in computerized systems vs. events in the physical world -- which can be noisy and imprecise.   I gave detailed answer about various cases where current systems have semantic gaps (this topic is discussed in chapter 11 of the EPIA book).      Have to get up early tomorrow to take the train to NYC, for the Event Processing capital markets meeting.     

On Hong Kong and ambidexterity

Hello from Singapore.    I have arrived here from Hong Kong yesterday,  here is a picture of myself in the Victoria Park in Hong Kong.   Hong Kong is run as a "special autonomy region" of China, under the "one country, two systems" idea.    I am not sure exactly what are the borders of autonomy, but it sure have a different look and feel from China -- different currency, car are driving on the left side, all announcements in the public transportation are done in Chinese and English, even in the local newspaper I've read about a possible teachers strike, something we are used to in Israel, but I am sure you don't see in China.   Hong Kong also has its own flag 

The "one country - two systems"  method, reminded me of the previous director of IBM Haifa Research Lab, who used to talk about ambidexterity,  where he meant that different activities in the same organizations have to be managed differently;   while this idea was not implemented at that time, I think that it is a really good idea,  organizations often tend to impose the same management model on all its activities, and this can be counter-productive,  managing going on activities, and innovative activities that might lead to breakthroughs should be totally different, as they are different in expectations, way people should be measured, and often in the organizational structure.   I think that we should see more of "one organization - two systems", some of it is managed by the right hand (and left part of the brain), and some by the left hand (and right side of the brain).

 

I'll write more on Hong Kong and Singapore - later.  

Going east

Packing to go abroad again -- this time to the east, the destination is Singapore, where I am participating in VLDB 2010 and giving a tutorial on event processing - past, present and future. 
But first -- I am flying later today to Hong Kong, as a first stop in the east.    

Events of the day - Darmstadt and OMG

I am now in Darmstadt, Germany, starting a long day of visiting the Technical University of Darmstadt, and giving a seminar talk at the university. In the evening I'll have to reach my next destination, Luxembourg, and this seems to be done in combination of 3 trains from here, will still need to figure it out.

Also, today you can hopefully hear me in the OMG event processing symposium along with some respectable members of the event processing community. This symposium has been reshaped as a virtual symposium, so people can tune in using cyberspace.

On our proposed EU project - Take I

CDG Airport, Paris.

This is, more or less, how the A3 road in Paris has looked like today when I was on my way to CDG airport, when I asked the taxi driver how long it will take to the airport he said - no more than 40 minutes, well it took 2 hours, and could have taken more, unless at some point he lost his patient, drove through the next exit, and navigated with his GPS through some small streets
to get to the airport from a different direction. Since the price of the taxi is a function not only of distance but of time also, then the price also exceeded (by far) his estimate... This was not the only traffic related event. My airline sent me SMS to notify me that my flight home has been cancelled and they re-booked me on the next flight 2 hours later (that's why I was not pressed of the long trip to the airport). They sent me the SMS in French, while I was sitting in a train, and the passenger sitting opposite to me was kind enough to translate me, 5 minutes later they re-sent me the same SMS, this time in Hebrew.

I ended the day in visiting ILOG, acquired by IBM, and before that in the morning, together with some of our partners, we had a meeting with the EU commission in Brussels, about a proposed EU project. This is planned to be a relatively big project that will look at the future web services infrastructure which will be event-driven, and include event-enabled BPM. . We got good and useful feedback, and have a lot of action items, like finalizing the consortium. I'll write more about it in the next few months.

Visiting Cambridge

Today I am in Birmingham, England. Yesterday I have visited Cambridge University for a few hours and gave a presentation about "event processing - the next generation", second time out of the four times I am going to give this presentation in various places this week. Cambridge has a relatively large research group called Opera, directed by Jean Bacon and Ken Moody, which deals with event-based middleware (among other things). Jean is also the "grandmother" of Apama, since John Bates has been her Ph.D. student. Apama still maintains a site in Cambridge, and some of the Apama guys came to hear my talk. While there were some periods that I did other things and had looser connections with the research community, I have returned last year to a scientist position, and am trying to keep closer contact with the research community, by visits, collaboration, and helping in the organization of DEBS as the flagship research conference in the event-based computing area. Later today I'll be visiting Aston University here in Birmingham, where my good friend, colleague, and mentor, Robert Berry, has taken recently a position of Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which I'll meet later today.

BTW -- for some reason I cannot get to the IBM VPN from here, probably something in security setting of the local Internet server, so anybody that contacted me by Email may have to wait until later this week.