On the role of storytelling

Storytelling became a popular trend.  While Steve Jobs made it popular, it is quite an ancient art.   My first comprehensive written document, submitted for promotion in the Israeli Air-Force, started with a story telling that when I started writing this, I had a terrible tooth pain.  The examiners actually were quite surprised, especially when in first few pages they had to go through a series of caricatures (I never knew how to draw, but I enlisted people who knew to help).   Their first reaction was -- this guy is not serious,  this is supposed to be a serious professional project.  However, when they kept reading, they understood why the story served as a good introduction to the project, and provided the ultimate motivation for what I am doing. Since that time I am practicing storytelling from time to time.  I found it very powerful, especially as a way to start a presentation, or in long presentations as a way to regain attention.  The art is to do the storytelling natural to the presentation, it has to be relevant and have a message or emphasize a point,  and not a distraction on out-of-context issue.   I notice that now there are even competitions on digital storytelling, 

The IBM CEO, Ginny Rometty, is famous for practicing storytelling.

Now I am looking for some good story for my next week tutorial in ER 2013.  I have to talk for three hours alone, so good stories are essential to get by...

On monitoring human behavior

In the event-based multimedia I met Pil Ho Kim from University of Trento.   He wears a camera that takes picture every minute from his life as long as other indicators such as temperature and creates his personal detailed log.   This is part of his study on human behavior,  He posted a presentation given at the ACM multimedia conference on Slideshare (it seems that he borrowed one slide from my presentation) entitled: "how to monitor human behavior".  He is using ESPER for doing event processing, based on the multimedia events collected.    This is a good example of using complementary technologies along with event processing. 

On events in multimedia research

Back at home -- I promised to provide some summary of impression from the events in multimedia workshop I attended earlier this week.    Meanwhile some of the presentation have been uploaded to the workshop website, as well as some pictures.    I recommend to view the presentation of  Ansgar Shcerp, it is the most interesting one (to me). 

I was not familiar with the multimedia research until being invited to this conference to have a dialogue with them.  My impression is that what they are doing is complementary to what we do in the event processing universe.   We assume that events exist and we need to process them, they start from pictures and video streams and try to detect what event is described in the picture, they care less about what somebody does with the event after being detected.    They have long discussions about "what is an event",  events that they have talked about in some talks are social events, sport events etc.   I think that a synergy between different communities who deal with different phases of the event processing story is vital in order to exploit events that come from multimedia sources, and will continue the dialogue with them/.  

On event semantics -- my talk in the event-based multimedia workshop

Still in Barcelona for the event-based multimedia workshop.   I still need to write on the second day and the closing panel (in which I also participated), and my impression about the event-based multimedia community.

Meanwhile -- I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare, parts of it is reuse of other presentation (e.g. the slides explaining the notion of context),  the new stuff is about the semantics -- who are the players in the event game.    I am planned to give a long tutorial on event modeling in ER 2013 next month - stay tuned. 

Workshop on event-based media integration and processing - the first day

This is the logo of the ACM multimedia 2013 conference that is taking place these days in Barcelona.

Co-located with this conference (we share the coffee in the coffee break) is the event-based media workshop which I am attending.  My talk is planned for today, so yesterday I was just a listener in the first day.   Here are some impressions:

The most interesting talk was the one by Ramesh Jain,  who is working on events in multimedia for a while.

Ramesh talked about cybernetics in society, and about smart systems defined as smart actions in respond to smartly detected situations.   He also talked about social networks and the Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Ramesh said that the social media concentrates on the third and fours layer - love/belonging and esteem,and posed as a challenge to get more focused on the basic needs - the two lower layers.  

Ramesh also talked about the 4V of big data,  Saying that the volume is the least important one -- as there are methods to partition the space, but the other three actually issue -- event processing in multimedia under uncertainty.  Ramesh mentioned  the Israeli company Waze (recently acquired by Google) as example of a smart social system.  

Some of the other talks concentrated about analysis of pictures that are put on social networks and try to identify the event they are describing, first see if they describe an event, and then identify the event - talking about sport events, public events, family events and more.   It is funny, since some of the event definitions view event as instantaneous occurrence - and then a sport event (say football game) is not an event since it takes (net) 90 minutes.  I guess that there are different views of events -- I'll mention it in my talk today.

There is no Internet of Things - (yet?)

"There is no Internet of Things", this is a title of a promotion for a recent Forrester report.  The report has one more word in its title -- "yet".   The (right) claim is that while there are a lot of sensors, mobile devices, wearable computing devices and vision about "Internet of Things",  and recently "Internet of everything", the vision was not fulfilled yet, and the world of sensors is still very fragmented.   

What made the (current) Internet successful is a combination of standard protocols, the ease of creating content, and the ease of retrieving its content with the combination of web browsers and search engines.  

In order for the Internet of Things to become "Internet" - there is a need to make it much simpler and standard oriented.  Imagine that in the current Internet the retrieval from the Internet would have required everybody to write SQL queries --  do you think that the Internet  would have become pervasive?

What is the equivalent?  --  standard and simple way to perform the functionality of IoT.   I'll be able to report about our related work  in a few weeks -- stay tuned. 

Start of a new semseter and upcoming talks

I have not written recently -- some due to a short vacation (in Paris), and some due to seasonal laziness.. 

In any event - this week the semester started in Israel, and I am giving an Event Processing course again at the Technion, this time I am doing some change in the course.   The course is still based on the EPIA book,  but I am updating now to teach event processing through a model-based approach, which corresponds to the project we are working on recently.  We are going to do first public exposure of this work in ER 2013 in Hong-Kong.  I'll write about it later.  

Next week, I am giving keynote talk in an event oriented workshop co-located with ACM Multimedia 2013.  in which I'll talk about the semantics and modeling of situations and contexts.   Both talks will become public after they are given.