The Fear Index

This morning I have finished reading "THE FEAR INDEX" by Robert Harris, who is known for his ancient Rome novels.  This time he has a "science fiction" that happens in the present coupled with a thriller.  It concentrates around hedge fund that uses AI for algorithmic trading,  and succeeds to crash the market and make a  huge earning by trading in short.   It is inspired by the 2010 flash crash.  


As I am a big fan of autonomic computing and  it utilization in daily life and in the business world, I often encounter people who have concerns about computers making decisions, and computers taking over.  Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark wrote the famous plot for the  film of "2001 space odyssey" in which the spaceship computer took over, the computer name was HAL, which is backwardly-removed one letter from IBM.    Some science fiction writers like Asimov also have a vision that computers (in this case android robots) will take over the world, but Asimov considers it as a good property,  since he was not a big fan of the human race.


I am not sure we are close to computers taking over the world, but autonomic systems should be constructed with self-monitoring that can be visible.  This is something that we'll be exploring (among other things) within new proposed project we are doing with many partners.   

On video streams and events

I have not written in this Blog for a while, last week I have been in a business trip in Brussels and Luxembourg, had a few hours to play tourist in Brussels and chose to go to mini-Europe, in the picture we see the France section - in the background the atomium, Brussels' iconic site.  Travelling in the train between Brussels and Luxembourg I had two observations:  the train accumulates delay, so it is better to  take a big slack of time if you rely on trains in Belgium, also it was interesting to see in stations the amount of people getting off to take advantage of the 2-3 minutes of stopping in order to smoke,  the amount of smokers in Europe in general, and in Belgium in particular is probably much higher than those we are used to in Israel (and other countries like USA and Canada).   

Getting back to the events business - I have noticed Rainer's posting in the complexevents forum, about video camera on the bus in Ireland that he experienced, actually there are various cameras on buses for various reasons - example video cameras installed on school buses whose aim according to the site is: 

•    Deter bullying, vandalism, and other offenses
•    Reinforce driver accountability
•    Document chain of events
•    Substantiate or refute claims
•    External stop arm activated video of passing motorists.

Realizing these goals there is a need to identify the events that need to be processed/notified/acted upon from the video stream.  Some are required in real-time - for example stop fights or eliminate accidents.  There are various other uses of use of video streams as source of events,  I guess that within the "Internet of Things" infrastructure, cameras are important part - while some work on detecting events out of streams exist (e.g. identify car license plate numbers for automatic tolls in roads),  more work is needed to fully exploit the opportunities here

Evented API

I have written in the beginning of this year about the fact that standard APIs is now an emerging trend,  and about the benefit of having standard API for event processing.  No standard yet but I came across "evented API specification" developed by Kynetx.   While the terminology is not entirely consistent with the terminology I am using, it is interesting to review such works, and advance into standard APIs in this area. 

On use of event processing in routing

Eric Roch, chief technologist of Perficient posted a question about the use of event processing for message routing rather than ESB, the router pattern is taken from the enterprise integration patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf that we cite several times in the EPIA book.  Roch mentions several reasons to use event processing, some of it  relates to non-functional characteristics such as low latency,  and in-memory management.   


I think that there is some continuum that relates to the routing requirements -  some of the routing decisions are quite simple, they are based on a predicate, typically on a value of a single attribute;  some are more complex, and the routing is determined according to a pattern that involves multiple messages, in other cases the routing decision might involved a structure like decision-tree or decision-table, yet in other cases the routing is determined according to probabilistic reasons.    


The better solution is not to have ESB and EP systems in isolation, and chose in each case what should be used, instead it is better to use a single programming model that includes all types of routing, and autonomic translation to implementation in various building blocks,  some of them are taken from event processing and some from ESB or traditional messaging systems,  this is the approach I prefer for event processing in general,   not stand-alone,  but synergistic with other technologies.    In 2008 I had a posting about event processing and ESB,  arguing that ESB is a natural carrier of event processing within a SOA architecture,  and indeed I think that we'll see more and more ESB products that are enriched by event processing capabilities. 

Pura vida

Pura vida  - means "pure life", is an expression that is being used in Costa Rica as: good morning, hello, response to the question "what's up?", general statement that life is good, thank you - and some others.  It is the motto behind life in Costa Rica.   We spent in Costa Rica 10 days (1 less than we planned),  and here are some impressions:

1.  Costa Rica is an excellent place for a trip in the nature - it has nice rain forests, rivers and volcanoes, as well beaches of the two oceans.
2. Animals -- you see them everywhere in nature.   There are various tours in foot, car and boat to see animals.   
3. The Parador hotel we stayed in the last 3 days of the trip is the best hotel I've ever been to (and I traveled all over the world). The picture above is the view from  the hotel room, it was elected several times as best hotel in central america (including Mexico), and best spa (I got there the best massage since my visit in Thailand in 2007), t it is located within a forest on a mountain overlooking the pacific  ocean in Manual Antonio,  it has various animals on site - a hawler monkey provided wake-up call in one of the days in 5am, with extremely loud voice, on the tree in front of the hotel room; a raccoon entered the daughters' room, when they did not close the balcony's door, and scared them a bit, other raccoons visited us at the dinner table,  and were scared away by the hotel staff.  An iguana caught some sun in the middle of the mini-golf course, and frogs have settled at night in the swimming pool. 
4. The local people in Costa Rica eat the same food - breakfast, lunch, dinner -- rice and beans and tropical fruits (in each they might have some supplements).   At the end we got tired from this food and escaped to the sushi menu at the Parador.
5. Rain -- Costa Rica has a lot of rain, especially in this season. It has a four day heavy rain storm at the pacific side, we had there in the last two of these in Monteverde, but we did most activities in the rain; luckily when we got to the beach the rain storm was over.
6. The road infrastructure cannot cope with the quantity of rain, thus many of the road have lot of holes, some of the main roads are not paved, and they call travelling in them as the "Costa Rican Massage".
7. Tourism has become the biggest industry in Costa Rica, over the last 25 years, which directed the education system towards this goal.   Most people can speak English.
8. The amount of Israelies we met was incredible given the distance and cost to get there,  it seems that it is now quite fashionable among Israelies who already explored Europe and USA to visit Costa Rica.
9. Iberia is the worst airline company I have ever used ---  in all aspects (including food),  the worst thing was that they did not let us get on the connection flight from Madrid to San Jose, Costa Rica, though we got to the gate 15 minutes before the scheduled flights, due to the fact that our flight from Israel was late 1 hour, and they decided they'll not have enough time to load the luggage, though we were 20 passengers coming on that flight, and the fact that they have 1 flight per day to Costa Rica, they did not agree to make any effort to get us on the flight.   They told us that since ELAL was responsible for the late flight - it is not their problem (we purchased the ticket from Iberia, and used Iberia ticket with code share).   We had to spend 24 hours in Madrid before getting on the next flight -- and lost the first segment of the trip (which is non-refundable as anything else in Costa-Rica).  I'll check if it is possible to sue Iberia for damages.   The attitude of their agents in Madrid was also very unfriendly - a big difference between the nice people of Costa Rica everywhere, and those of Spain). 
10. And on positive aspect --- Pura vida --- is a motto of positive thinking!

For more picture --- I am waiting that my daughters will put all the pictures taken on facebook. 

Now it is a lazy holiday -- back to work early next week, and already a business trip to Europe!

Touring the universe again; current destination: Costa Rica

In a few hours we are planned to start the long journey to Costa Rica, the chosen destination of our next Family vacation,  during the holiday period (here in Israel).     Will be out of touch for the next couple of weeks.

More on Internet of Things and event processing for personal systems

This illustration is taken from a recent Blog posting by Phil Windley, the CTO of Kynetx, whom I met in DEBS'11.   Phil writes about IoT as a source of personal event processing, and about "personal event bus", in which any consumer can subscribe to events and process them individually.


I have provided some background about IoT recently and about its potential to be game changer;  the personal systems is an interesting aspect.   Event processing models and systems of the first generation have been developed in mind of business oriented systems. However, I have stated before that I see the big potential of event processing outside the traditional corporate IT, and provided robotics and biological computing as some areas of interest.  Consumer applications is definitely an area with a lot of potential, however the challenges to do it is beyond collecting and subscribing to events, it is the ability to compose event processing application by consumers, which requires progress in the abstraction level of composing such applications.  This is definitely and avenue to pursue.