OMG event processing symposium and other event processing conferences

I was recently invited to give a talk in the OMG event processing symposium that will take place in Washington DC (actually, Arlington VA) in May 24-25, 2010. I will give a talk about -- event processing seven years from now --- talking about where the event processing area goes in the future, this will be a week following the Dagstuhl seminar on event processing, and some of the conclusions may be reported there. The OMG new event processing consortium that will be kicking off in that event is another indication to the importance that the IT community places on the event processing, and the visibility it gains. This is a customers' oriented conference, whose aim is to educate the general community about event processing.

We also announced that EPTS will be doing its annual conference in November, co-located with the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Foundations Seminar, in Los Angeles. In this conference EPTS (possibly in collaboration with OMG) will grant two kind of awards: event processing innovative foundation awards (for research work) and event processing innovative application award. Stay tuned for call for nominations soon.

More on family trees

Still holiday week, and I am spending some of it on investigating my family history, got to over 200 leaves in the family tree, and keep growing, on one branch of the tree I already got to the 18th century. This is a picture of a second cousin of my father, her name is Pola, and she was perished in the Holocaust in the age of 23, found her picture, since her father who survived the war, documented her, nobody can mistake her to be part of our family, she has striking resemblance to some of the people I know. This is an interesting process, and I am renewing connections with relatives that I've not talked with in years. Back to "event processing thinking" after the holiday in Tuesday.

On family trees

Taking advantage of the holiday week to do some shopping, since trying to move the hour in my watch to "summer clock" (what is known as: Daylight Saving Time), I've discovered that the watch is getting older, and it is not easy to tune it, I decided it is time to buy myself a new watch, my previous watch was digital with two different time zones, two stopper watches, alarm, and some more options. I decided to go back to basic and return to the good old analog watch, and chosen a locally manufactured one shown in the picture. Speaking about "back to the basics", I have also participated yesterday in an extended family meeting, one of my relatives decided to kick off a project of investigating the family tree, find unknown relatives in various places, and understand how some relatives whose relations is unclear are related. Creating family trees is kind of a fashion. The idea is to do some investigation (and roles have been distributed between us), and do an extended family event (yesterday only part of the people were there) with presentation about the family history. I have never been into investigating family histories, but the younger generation seems interested, so we'll give it a try... and will try to renew connection with some more distant relatives (e.g. the large Canadian branch of the family), can be interesting... The organizer also took pictures and already posted some of them on his website, the second raw has pictures of me, my wife and three of my four daughters (the eldest one did not join the meeting).

More on event processing agents

There are various agents types of agents in reality, like the one shown above, likewise there are various agents types in computing, as I've discussed long time ago in this Blog, but since that time the thinking was somewhat evolved. Recently, Jim Odell, a long time agents advocate, has been hosted by the TIBCO CEP Blog, and advocated the use of agent technology in event processing, providing scalability as main motivation. In the Event Processing in Action book we are making EPA (Event Processing Agent), a term coined by David Luckham, as the most notable building block in our model. The term agent is used as software agent, and not necessarily agent in the AI sense. We are using the term agent as a meta level, where in the run-time level there are agent instances that can be implemented in various ways. Event Processing Agents in event processing are event-driven in the sense that they are taking one or more events as input, perform some processing on these events, and derive one or more events.

EPA can filter events, transform events, detect event patterns or do any combination of the above. Event processing agents are typically (but not always) associated with context, thus context related operations determine when an EPA instance is open or close, assume that the context is a temporal sliding window of non overlapping periods of 2 hours, and there is an EPA associated with this context, then every 2 hours, an instance of this EPA terminates and another instance is initiated. In essence EPA interacts with events in various ways:

• An EPA receive events as input
• An EPA processes events
• An EPA may query historical events
• An EPA derives events as output
• Through context -- an EPA instance may be initiated or terminated by events

Each EPA instance is autonomous in the sense that it does not communicate with any other EPA instance, and thus can be implemented by different run-time artifact, which indeed can enable scalability. However, there can be various grouping of EPA instances to run-time artifacts, where the two extremes are: run-time artifact for every EPA instance, and a single run-time artifact that contains all the EPA instances within the application.

Benefits of using EPA are -- simplicity of the model, modularity, and as said flexibility in implementation that may support various scalability and performance objective functions. I'll write more about EPA - later.

Some media events

I have written last week about participating in an entrepreneurship panel, where there has been a discussion on whether innovation in big companies is counted or not, it turns out that the echo of this discussion got to the national press in Israel, although you have to read Hebrew in order to understand what is written. Well - for those who do, they did not quote me accurately, and even did not spell my name correctly... go figure.

And from past media event to future one, in Thursday I am participating in an IBM Webinar given on the ebizQ platform. The Webinar is a blend of the IBM "business agility now" message and its relations to event processing, and some selected topics from the EPIA book. The Webinar is planned for Thursday, March 25th at noon USA EDT. You are all invited.

On the goat hill

This picture was taken in the "goat hill", which is a very nice hill below our neighborhood that is used for retreat into nature, 10 minutes walk from home, and many children activities. Alas, there is now a decision to build new neighborhood and destroy the nice hill, yesterday, the children active in the "nature protection society" including my daughter Hadas did a guided excursion to show people what is about to be destroyed, and help mark flowers, since the society is going to move the flower away at the end of the summer while they hibernate. Unlike some of the other cities in Israel that are built on sands and are just collection of houses, Haifa is a city that was built on a ridge that contains a collection of hills, with a lot of trees and flowers. There is a balance between the green and the grey. However, the green parts are getting smaller. When I was a child the ridge was much greener, the house that we live in now was a pine forest, some pine trees still remain among the houses, it is important to leave some parts of the city as nature reserves that will stay as they are. Sometimes the city leaders give in to greedy constructors, and the people of Haifa are fighting in multiple fronts against it; all we could do is to join the people who participated in this excursion, but it seems that there is no way to stop the new neighborhood construction.

Participating in entrepreneurship panel

Today was a rare event where people could see me walking around with a tie, this happened due to the fact that I was invited to participate in a panel in a big conference that was organized by the entrepreneurship institute at the Technion, which also organizes a students' entrepreneurship competition. I was invited to participate in a panel that dealt with "entrepreneurship everywhere", which included people who initiated various activities in various areas. I have shared with the audience some of my experience as intraprenuer. I heard that my usual kind of talk which involves humor and some provocative statement, was well accepted, although, as usual, some people were not happy from things I've said.

One person felt strongly that I really don't belong to panel about entrepreneurship, as a real entrepreneur is a person who takes person risks by investing his own money, the panel moderator did not agree with her. Well, I have never claimed to be entrepreneur, but I think there are some similarities and also some differences between entrepreneur and intraprenuer. Another person who did not like what I said approached me when I was leaving. When talking about my background I told the audience that I have been a faculty member in the Technion, and did not feel I have enough impact on the world by just writing papers, he said that there were people who had great impact on the world by just writing papers, like Einstein. I agreed with him and said that I have talked about the fact that I did not think that I can have enough impact on the world by just writing papers, and he said that I should have emphasized that it is possible to have great impact on the world by just writing papers. This is of course true, though in the area of computer software is not that easy.

When asked what is the most important advice for those who want to succeed in achieving things within large organizations, I quoted the rule: Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.