Adding voice to event processing

Richard Seroter reports on a demo he constructed using the cloud version of Microsoft Streaminsight and Twillio services to get situation detected by event processing and then send a voice message as a notification,  he also outlines the code behind this demo (a video clip with the demo itself would be cool addition). 

In this case the voice is being used as event consumer to send notifications,  it will also be interesting, but of course more challenging to have voice as producer for events,  actually there are some works done on this area and I'll try to get more details and report on it. 

DEBS 2012 program is available

The organizers of DEBS 2012  (this year I had nothing to do with the organization of this conference) have published the full program and the tutorial program.  This year the conference will take place in Berlin, and the conference logo contains this Berlin photo.  

Looking at the program I see familiar names as well as some new ones. It seems that the organizers kept the new sessions we introduced in 2011 - gong show and DEBS challenge,  it will be interesting to see how these will evolve.    As for keynote speakers - the industrial keynote speaker this year will be  Raman from Microsoft (the topic has not been published yet),  the academic keynote speakers will be Dave Maier on using frames in data streams, and Martin Odersky on actors (seems that AI based concepts are in).     The tutorial program will include variety of tutorials,  the tutorial that our team has prepared this year together with Alex Artikis from NCSR, Athens, deals with various aspects of uncertainty in event processing (well - we still need to work on the slides!).   There are other interesting tutorials as well, so picking one will be tough choice.

We also presenting a paper in the scientific track on the basic proactive model.  I'll write more about these two topics later. 

Hope to meet a lot of old friends in Berlin. 

More on doing what one is inspected to do instead of what one is expected to do

I have already written last year about the seminal phrase of Lou Gerstner cited in the title of this post,  about the negative side of addiction to metrics as behavior controllers.      Today I found a blog posting by one of my IBM research colleagues, Matthias Kaiserwerth, the director of the Zurich Research Lab, entitled: Big data analytics - why delayed flight makes for more satisfied customers.    In this posting  Matthias quotes a talk by Andy Neely that indicates some of the phenomena associated with metrics.   

One example is that when a measure in a call center is to resolve a client's issue within 2 minutes, the agent starts to close the call after 1:45 minutes, regardless if the client' issue is resolved, since the agent is measured on length of the call and not on results.   Actually I saw such cases in which some administrators who are measured on time of handling requests preferred to find some reason to close the request and not handle it since the time exceeded their metrics.  

Another example that landed its name to the cited posting 

One of the major  metrics for airlines is "friendly staff",  using analytics techniques the results show that their is a positive correlation between flights being delayed and the friendliness of the staff, since the staff is very nice in trying to calm down angry passengers that become nervous about missing flights (and sometimes promise things that their colleagues in the destinations don't really accomplish),   taking this ad absurdum - the flight company should deliberately delay flight to enable the staff to maximize their friendliness metrics.

Neely has his own version of Gerstner's phrase:  doing the right things rather then doing things right.  

As I noted in my original post --  the metrics oriented culture is in many cases damaging and we should go back to the basics --- understand what are the right things.

More - later

Event processing and mobile devices

The current big buzzwords in the IT world are: analytics,big data, cloud and mobile.   These are believed to be the most influential trends on the IT directions.  I have already written about analytics and big data in some previous post, today I'll write on the mobile universe from the point of view of event processing.  

Putting the mobile devise symbol on a drawing of an event driven architecture, we can view multiple roles:

1. Mobile device can be a producer of events -- this may be both implicit events, using the mobile devise as a sensor and tracking the location of the mobile device over time  or explicit events, where a human use mobile devise to report events (such as:  traffic jams, completion of tasks, start of the work day)
2. Mobile device can also serve as consumer of events -- subscription to either raw or derived events can be manifested within notification in form of Email, SMS, or mobile application.   It seems that most uses of mobile devises are the consumer and producer roles.    There are also some more sophisticated possible uses, discussed next.
3. One can build event processing agent logic using mobile devise, but it is more likely that the use in this case will be to use predefined templates in order to define specific instances of EPA. For example, if the application is subscription to events in my bank account, I might get a template giving me an opportunity to subscribe when my accounts reached a balance of more than X or less than Y, I received a deposit of more than Z, or that the total withdrawals for a single days are more than W.   Using the mobile device I can chose any of them and give value to the X, Y, Z, W variables.
4. A dashboard showing the real-time state considering the streaming events can be also displayed as a mobile application
5. Last but not least -- An EPA can reside on the mobile device itself,  collection data and doing some filtering or aggregation.

In a follow-up post I'll try to switch direction and look at event processing from the mobile point of view.

More - later.  

Towards proactive enterprise intelligence by Gregoris Mentzas

I came across a recent presentation given by Gregoris Mentzis (from NTUA, Greece) entitled "towards proactive enterprise intelligence".  In this presentation Gregoris discusses some research challenges.

The capabilities of proactive enterprise intelligence are defined in slide 21 and seem similar to our definition (I also recognized the pictures).  I'll write more about the two patterns expressed in this slide. 

Reading this presentation is recommended. Enjoy! 

Driving while looking at the rear-view mirror

Typically I don't recommend commercial Blogs, but I'll make an exception this time, and cite Mark Palmer's post, since I like the metaphor he made, reflected in this picture.  According to Mark, analytics that refers to the past is like driving by only looking at the rear-view mirror,  which of course can show the road you have already passed.  Since typically we drive forward and not backward it should be more useful to look ahead than to look back.   In many cases the road is fixed, in the sense that the road forward looks exactly like the road backward, and then it might make sense to do it,  however, in other cases, like driving in real traffic and not in a bubble, the road ahead may contain surprises that are not evident from the previous parts of the road. 

The interesting thing is that even law latency event processing system are, in fact, looking at the past,  where the past is almost the present,  looking to the future is not a standard event processing feature.   

On the city data management workshop in CIKM'12

I am one of the co-chairs of the "City Data Management 2012" workshop in CIKM'12 

The work on smart cities have been emerged in the last few years.  The data management aspect of smart cities is one of the major topics, due to the need to acquire significant amount of data, much of it streaming data, and perform monitoring, search, query and various analytics.  The workshop focuses on the several aspects of city data management.    The call for papers is now out,   the interesting part for me is the data monitoring part, which consists of the following points:

• Complex Event Processing for Smarter Cities
• Anomaly detection and prevention
• Forecasting city events
• Event-based optimization for adaptive city operations
• City process monitoring

If you are in this area -- consider submission. Note that the conference will take place in Maui, Hawaii.