Call for papers - DEBS 2013 in Arlington Texas

The DEBS conference is returning to the USA, in 2013 it will occur in Arlington, Texas.

The call for papers (in the research and industrial tracks), tutorials, demos, PhD workshop, and grand challenge can be found in the conference's website.    Note that the industrial track consists of industry papers, and industry experience reports do not require full papers.

The deadline for submission in most categories is February 8, 2013  and the conference itself will be held on June 29 - July 3, 2013.

On gesture events as regular expressions - Proton from Berkeley

Proton is a name of a project in which have investigated the proactive event-driven approach (see our talk in DEBS'2012). I came across another proton, this time from UC Berkeley.  It deals with codifying gestures as regular expressions of touch event symbols.  In the website you can find tutorial, downloadable version and papers.   Interesting idea,  enjoy!

SAS announcement on event processing

SAS announced today that a new "SAS DataFlux Event Stream Processing Engine" will be available in December.  It is described as: "the new software is a form of complex event processing (CEP) technology...incorporates relational, procedural and pattern-matching analysis of structured and unstructured data".     Welcome to the event processing club,  this seems to be an indication that the analytics guys see the value of adding event processing to their portfolio, I guess that either the "limited appeal" of event processing has somewhat changed in the last couple of years to justify it.  Anyway - I welcome SAS to the club, and hope that they will also become active  part of the event processing community.  

On big data, small things and events that matter

In a recent post in the Harvard Business Review Blog entitled: "Big Data Doesn't Work if You Ignore the Small Things that Matter" ,  Robert Plant argues that in some cases organization invest a lot in "big data" projects trying to get insights around their strategy, while failing to notice the small things, like customers leaving due to bad service.   Indeed big data and analytics are now fashionable and somewhat over-hyped.  There is also some belief, fueled by the buzz that it solves all the problems of the universe, as argued by Sethu Raman in his DEBS'12 keynote address.   Events are playing both in the big data game, but also in the small data game, trying to observe a current happening, such as time-out on service, long queues etc..., when it relates to service, and other phenomena in other domains.  Sometimes the small things are the most critical.

I'll write more about big data and statistical reasoning in a subsequent post.

More on the semantic overloading of derived events

I am recently getting back to the time in which I have dealt with semantic data models, and now I am trying to view current event-driven applications in that way, thus the semantic overloading is one of the interesting first issues that emerge.  I'll write more about semantic modeling of event processing later, but right now I'll concentrate in the semantic overloading of derived events.   There are various definitions of the term "event", but in all of them event represents a VERB in the natural language.   Looking at what we defined as derived events, it seems that some of the derived events we are looking at can indeed be described by a verb in the natural language, while others are really described by nouns.    Thus my current thinking is to have the semantic notion of DERIVATION, but the derivation can yield different concepts:

Events - when indeed the derived conclusion is that something (virtually) happened.

Entity facts - when the derived conclusion is a value of some fact

Messages - when the derived conclusion is some observation that has to be notified to some actor. 

Examples from the Fast Flower Delivery use case that we used in the EPIA book.  

The automatic assignment creates a real event -- can be expressed by the verb ASSIGN

The timeout pattern "pickup alert" which means that a pickup was not done on time --- this is an observation that is notified to somebody.  It is therefore a message that can be expressed by NOTIFICATION

The driver-ranking calculated as a function of assignment count, is actually a fact related to driver, driver-ranking is a noun, thus it is a derived fact.

More - later. 

On family vacation in Malta

I have not disappeared, spent most of the previous week in a family vacation in Malta.   Malta is a small country consists of several islands in the  Mediterranean sea  The climate is similar to the one we have in Israel.  The local language is also a Semitic language like Hebrew, it is actually a descendant of the Arabic language mostly. Like any other Mediterranean people - they are nice, friendly, and take their time.  We lived 5 minutes walk from the capital city of Valletta, which is a small city surrounded by walls and looks somewhat similar to the old city of Jerusalem.  In the evening it looks like a deserted place, nobody is walking in the street, and besides a few restaurants it looks like a ghost town. 

Some highlights:

There is a prehistoric site which has limited visitation (10 per hours), we made reservation 2 months ahead to get inside. 

Malta is a catholic country, and have a lot of ancient churches, we have visited some of them. 

We decided to rely on public transportation, which is cheap but time consuming, some of the lines have low frequency --- not really a good choice.

We took a day trip to Gozo, the northern island which has nice beaches.  

The Maltese people like to celebrate - we have watched too separate celebrations, one of them in the honor of the national fish, called Lampuki,   the other in Valleta  is the Valleta white night.  I am not sure what the celebration is about, but it was crowded and noisy, which is a contrast to the regular silent in Valleta.

Hope that my daughters will post pictures on Facebook soon. 

In general:  nice place for vacation.

I'll continue with professional blogging, hopefully tomorrow.

The semantic overload of derived events

The term "derived events" is frequently used in the event processing terminology.  Here is an example taken from the Gigaspaces Blog of using the term "derived event".    Recent discussion with somebody who is just learning the event processing area, made me realized that we overload the term "derived event".  On one hand we define event as "something that happens", and say that a derived event is an event, thus one may assume that derived events also happen.    However, the way this term is typically used has some semantic overloading.   There are actually different types of derived events.

One type of derived event is really an event that we did not observe directly, but concluded that it happened by observing other events.  Such cases is the case of fraud detection, money laundering detection and system problem diagnostics.   

Another type of derived event is a notification.   We are doing a calculation based on events and the result is notified to some person of application.  For example: derived event that calculates the highway fees, based on exit and entry events on the highway, and rate calculated by load on the highway.   This is a derived event, however - it does not really stands for something that happens, the happening here is a notification to the driver how much the fees are,  there are many derived events of this type.

The question is whether we should make distinction between the two cases. From semantic point of view they are clearly distinct.    From execution model and language point of view -- they are indistinguishable; both take events as input, apply some assertions and functions over a collection of event, and create a structured message sent on some channel.    From semantic point of view there is a difference,  the question is from pragmatic point of view, is this distinction important for somebody that takes any role in the life-cycle of the application.   More -later.