On mining and detection of human sentiments

An exhausting week,  followed by over-sleeping during the weekend (our weekend is Friday and Saturday), and a 2.5 hours session with the dentist in the middle.


This week I heard in one of the IBM internal meetings some impression from a customer meeting in Europe.
The topic was data mining, and the insight has been that mining is trying to learn patterns based on the past behavior.   This works in some cases, but might not be enough in other cases; the reason is that in some cases what we actually need to learn is human behavior, and assuming that past behavior is a good indicator may be wrong, thus the domain should be extended to analyzing and predicting human sentiments and human behavior.   This is, of course, not a new area,  and the behavioral sciences people are studying it for years, one notable work is the work on prospect theory, that brought Daniel Kahneman the Noble prize (the co-inventor of the prospect theory, Amos Tversky,  passed away before the Noble prize was given, and the prize is being awarded to living persons only).   There are other works in this area, and some are being used in reality.    Getting multi-disciplinary work is quite important for enabling intelligent systems and enable predictive analytics.  More on this - later. 

DEBS 2011 - call for participation

ACM DEBS 2011 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION 

The ACM DEBS (Distributed Event Based System) is the flagship conference of the event-based systems community.
DEBS 2011 will be held in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA in July 11-15, 2011.   


The DEBS 2011 program is now available in 

http://debs2011.fzi.de/index.php/conference-programme

The conference includes:

*  23 Research papers 

*  10 Inudstrial papers

*   5 Tutorials

*  Gong Show

*  Demo and poster workshop

*  4 Keynote speakers:  

     Christopher Bird (chief architect, Sabre Airline Solutions);

     Donald F. Ferguson (CTO, CA); 

     Johannes Gehrke (Cornell University);

    Calton Pu (Georgia Institutue of Technology)

*  Special invited talk:  Eddie Epstein (IBM Research) on Watson -  the computer  program that won against the Jeopardy! human champions 

Registration site is open: 

http://debs2011.fzi.de/index.php/conference-registration  

Note that the early registation deadline is June 15.

See you all in Yorktown!  

On cooperative writing, crowdsourcing and event processing

Earlier this week another Amazon shipment has arrived, now I need a month vacation to read all of that, and also thinking about where to put additional book closet or two, since may house is looking like a book warehouse, with piles of books everywhere.  One of the books that I have started reading is the book whose cover you see above, written by Lisa Lutz (one of my recent favorite writer) and David Hayward, and the cooperation is that Lisa is writing the odd chapters and David is writing the even chapters.  Since it is a kind of crime book, the plot  is developing according to two different mind, the book also includes the exchange of messages that the authors send to one another.   Events have been a long time part of cooperative work.  In computerized cooperative systems, events is means of communication, as well as a means to get to cooperative decisions (such as: cooperative transaction commitments protocols). Nowadays, cooperative systems are not just among computerized systems, but among people.   One of the consequences of  the Web 2.0  is the crowdsourcing.  Currently event processing is not mentioned as a key technology in crowdsourcing.  However, I can see the connection - first in the dissemination:  bringing the information to those who can do the next step.  Also, since different parts of the task are done by different people,  there is a need to see a combination of activities and notify about consequences.  As an example:  a vehicle design is done by different people, some design the mechanic components, and some the electronic components.  Change in one of them that impacts the other can be done using analysis of the various design events.    More on this topic - later

On outside-in vs. inside-out innovation

Today I participated in presenting to some young people from the Israeli Defense Forces, that are going around in research institutes in academia and industry to understand what is innovation, and what is research.   Recently, there has been an article in one of the Israeli newspapers that talked about inside-out vs.outside-in innovation, or where are great ideas coming from?    Many companies are trying to do outside-in innovation, doing market surveys to identify gaps and requirements in order to determine what next to do;  this article claimed that some of the bigger innovations (e.g. Facebook, iPhone and more) are inside-out, somebody comes with great idea out of the blue,  and it is sometimes being used for purposed that the inventor did not imagine.   The outside-in is used to refine, and shape the next generations.   I believe that this observation is true,  one cannot obtain great ideas from customers' requirements, as they typically don't think that they need it until it is there.   

On big events and big data

The "Big Data" phenomenon gains a lot of traction, interest, and related work in recent years.   The Internet and making everything in digital form has resulted in amounts of data beyond past imagination, and the rate of growth is amazing.   Mark Palmer in his Blog posting made the analog of data as sand, 

saying that  "If every grain of sand in the bucket was 1 byte of data, then:

• The entire work of Shakespeare fills just one bucket of sand (about 5MB)
• A fast financial market data feed (OPRA) fills a beach of sand in 24 hours (about 5TB) 
• Google processes all the sand in the world every week (about 100PB)
• We generate 60% more sand every year" 

Using this analogy - if all data in the world is a sand,  much of the sand is talking about facts, BTW - the fact that a fact appears as a data in the big data universe, does not say that this fact is in fact true.  

Events issue some of this data, but in many cases an event is the fact that a fact becomes true or false, and this fact is not really kept in the data.   

The "Dagstuhl grand challenge",  which is part of the event processing manifesto, is talking about an "event fabric", which will be the Internet equivalent of events instead of data, I guess that the quantities will be on the same cardinality, thus   it will have the same scalability challenge. The main difference is the type of processing -   event processing instead of queries/information retrieval.    Getting to an "event fabric" has indeed many challenges.  In DEBS 2011 there will be a tutorial about this grand challenge.   I'll write more about this challenge in the future. 

(and this is of course Schloss Dagstuhl) 

Watson meets DEBS 2011

DEBS 2011 will take place in the Yorktown Heights auditorium, the same site in which the famous recording to the Jeopardy! programs in which the computer has won against two human champions.  The Watson hardware resides very close to this auditorium.  With some effort we succeeded to bring Eddie Epstein, one of the senior persons behind Watson has agreed to be an invited speaker in DEBS 2011,  Eddie will also provide a demo of the system.    


The full program of DEBS 2011 will be advertised around this weekend, the list of accepted papers can be found on this Blog.   


It should be note that if you plan to be in DEBS -- plan to stay for the entire conference, besides the 33 presentations, the attractions will be spread among the days  - no day can be skipped!


Monday, July 11 will be the  tutorial  day, and in the late afternoon there will be the EPTS award granting event. 
Tuesday, July 12 will have the two industrial keynote speakers: Chris Bird and Don Ferguson (see here for more about the keynote speakers),  and in the later afternoon a reception, and after getting some alcohol, the "gong show",  in which the participants can express outrageous ideas about future features and utilization of event processing technology.   
Wednesday, July 13 will have the keynote talk of Johnnes Gehrke,  the demo and poster session including the grand challenge,  and the conference banquet with artistic performance, and the DEBS awards (best paper, best idea in the gong show, best demo and maybe more). 
Thursday, July 14  will have the keynote talk of Calton Pu, and the invited talk of Eddie Epstein on Watson.


None of these day should be missed -- plan accordingly!


The fifth day - July 15 will be the PhD workshop adjacent to the conference.    


See you all in Yorktown.  

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.