Proactive computing -- keynote talk in the OMG event processing CoP conference

Hello from Philadelphia again.  Today I spent the day in NYC (got by train and returned to Philly in the evening). 
I have attended the OMG event processing CoP conference for financial markets that was held in Madison Avenue in NYC.    I'll write about the conference soon -- but for now, just a short posting about my own presentation;  I have given a keynote address (actually in the program it has been written as luminary keynote, not sure I am a luminary, but it seems that Brenda Michelson who organized the conference likes to use this term).  Anyway -- I have given in the first time a public talk about our activities in the proactive event-driven computing area,  talking also about the "first of a kind" program of IBM Research which enables to do research work in collaboration with end users.    I got several insights from the audience about various applications that I have not thought about for proactive computing, and will follow-up with some of them -- this is one of the directions to which the event processing area will evolve, and it seems to be an exciting direction to pursue, more about it - later.

Visiting Temple University - 20 years after graduation

I have finished my PhD studies 20 years ago in Temple University in Philadelphia, and after many years I have visited my old school today, and gave a talk in the CIS department seminar.  It was interesting to meet again those faculty members who are there, and some new ones.  I was especially happy to meet my advisor, Giorgio Ingargiola,  who is about to retire at the end of this year.  Giorgio has been a great mentor on clear thinking, and  a major influencer on my own development, here is Giorgio's current picture.

I have some follow-ups, especially on the software engineering of event-based systems which I may have found a collaborator.    Giving a seminar I got some interesting questions, one of them about the gap between events in computerized systems vs. events in the physical world -- which can be noisy and imprecise.   I gave detailed answer about various cases where current systems have semantic gaps (this topic is discussed in chapter 11 of the EPIA book).      Have to get up early tomorrow to take the train to NYC, for the Event Processing capital markets meeting.     

DEBS 2011 calls are finalized

DEBS 2011 calls have been now finalized and can be found on the DEBS 2011 website.  The calls are for the traditional tracks -- research track, industrial track, tutorials, demos, PhD workshop (still TBD).
The new tracks in DEBS 2011 are:

• DEBS challenge:   this will consist of an event processing application with a call for demonstration of its implementation in various approaches; this is targeted to commercial and non commercial implementations, the non commercial implementations will be able to participate in a competition where the major criterion will be ease of use.
• Gong show:  participants will have 5 minutes to present new ideas - both research idea, and interesting kind of usage in event-based systems and technologies.  The audience will vote the best idea.
• The industrial track will have an "experience reports" sub-track, that will not require submission of papers, but abstracts only. 

Note that there are four committed keynote speakers.     I'll follow the progress of DEBS 2011 in this blog. 

New review for the EPIA book

It is holiday again, and tomorrow I am leaving for a short (2 days) vacation here in Israel with my family, and then in Sunday night, travelling to the USA for a short (4 days) business trip, where the highlight will be participation in the event processing - capital markets conference of OMG EP CoP;  here is the conference's program. I have been travelling too much recently, hope that after this trip I'll have a break in travelling.


Today I've noticed a new review of the EPIA book posted by Tushar Jain, a person I have not been familiar with so far.   Good to see that people like the book.   The reviewer is right that the conceptual model we described in the book still need to obtain acceptance like UML and BPMN,  well -- the next step is to try and work on standard proposal for event processing modeling language, and I'll take advantage of my coming trip to USA to try and kickoff this activity.
One comment -- I don't see the other books mentioned as competitive.  The book of Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte is a business oriented book, and our book is a technical oriented book, so the intersection is fairly limited, furthermore, we mention in the book that we don't deal thoroughly with the business perspective, and recommend Chandy and Schulte's book as a complimentary for those who would like to get deeper understanding of the business perspective.      Later in October I'll start teaching again a course in the Technion based on the EPIA book (first one since the book is out, though I have used the book's draft for previous course).

On the duration of an event

I have neglected the blogging for a while, returned from my trip in Asia, planning for my next business trip to USA (I am travelling too much, I hope for a non-travelling period after that, but one can never know), and also took some days off for the Succot holiday.    Yesterday I traveled with most of my family to Tel-Aviv, to "Beit Hatfutsot", which stands for "Diaspora house", and documents the life of Jewish community over the history in many countries.    Here is an artifact from the exhibition:

There was also an exhibition of Andy Worhal painting notable Jewish persons,  one of the pictures is of Golda Meir, the only Israeli Woman prime-minister (time for the second one?) 

The VLDB conference also uploaded pictures from the conference, so here are two pictures - one from my tutorial, and the second showing me in the first raw (it was not really the first raw, but it was the first captured by the camera) listening to the keynote talk:

While I have been away there were some Blog posts by Paul Vincent that worth focusing upon, I have already commented briefly to this one, but want to have longer reaction about the issue of event duration that was raised by Paul.   


In most of the models events are considered as instantaneous, occurring within a single time point,  the temporal database glossary from 1998 puts "instantaneous" as part of the definition of event, the rationale is of looking on event as transition between two states, and transition in most models takes zero time,    A few years ago when we started the discussions about terms, I've pointed out the temporal glossary as a source for event definition, and David Luckham issued a strong objection to that definition, claiming that no event is really instantaneous,  even simple events like the "aircraft is landing" takes more than zero time, while events that are composed of other events - "complex events" - like the 1929 crisis (now we can talk about the 2008 crisis) is compose of many events and occurred over an interval.   


This is, of course, true, yet it is more convenient from computational point of view to deal with discrete time points than in intervals, furthermore, some systems have detection time semantics, looking at the time-stamp in which the event entered the system, rather than the time it occurred, this is the reason that we find time point semantics in most systems.


We can look at the following cases:

1.  The event really occurs within a time point,  e.g. time series of sensor measurements, or stock quotes.  There is indeed an interval among two successive events, but this relates to the state between the intervals and not the events themselves.
2. The event occurs within an interval, but the granularity of our time computation is bigger than the interval, thus we can approximate the interval to a time point.   Example:  the granularity we are interested is an hour, thus even if an event occurs within several minutes, we can still approximate it to the closest hour. 
3. The event occurs within an interval, and it is important to process it with an interval semantics, since we would like to see it relationship to another time interval (e.g. temporal context).
4. The event occurs in an unknown time-point that is bounded by an interval, there is some probability (e.g. uniform distribution) that it happened in any point of time within the interval.  In VLDB there has been a paper by Yaneli Diao and her students entitled: Recognizing Patterns in Streams with Imprecise Timestamps    Note that in this paper there are also some references to interval based semantics (of type 3).
5. Derived events are another type of events whose temporal semantics may be tuned.   For example:  the derived event "frustrated customer"  is being derived when a customer approaches a call center the third time about the same topic,  the question is whether the customer is frustrated only when approaches the third time, or the customer is frustrated over all the time since the frustrating event occurred until it is fixed. Furthermore,  derived event may also indicate an event that will happen in a future interval.   I'll write more about this issue in the future.

Bottom line:  the event processing systems of the next generation should support both time point and interval semantics along with uncertainties (Paul also had posting about "fuzzy patterns" on which I'll write in the future).

On Singapore and some thoughts about the western democracy

Back home after a week in Singapore (VLDB conference + a few days of being a tourist, using public transportation).    Here is the Merlion - Singapore's symbol:

and here is myself in the Singapore's zoo which resides inside  a beautiful rain-forest.

I also learned about Singapore culture and unique political structure, Singapore is a combination of people who are by origin Chinese, Indian and Malayan - and all these languages are spoken, but the common language is English.  I have read in the local newspaper brought to my hotel room every morning an interview with Lee Kuan Yew,  the person behind Singapore, one of the question addressed to this 87 years old statesman is about the democracy style.  Singapore does not have democracy in the western style, what Lee called in the interview "competition based politics", and the power is held by a single group of people throughout Singapore's lifetime so far, but the results are very impressive -- it has the largest growth rate in the world in 2010, the economic is good, the quality of life is high and people are generally happy, the government is one of the less corrupted and most transparent in the world.   This adds to the skepticism I have developed over the years towards the western style politics, of course, there is always a danger that people in power may abuse it, but this is true no matter how they got to power. I am not sure that the current system in which people elect their leaders according to their TV appeal really brings the right kind of leaders.  Come to think of it, in the corporate world, a corporate does not elect it CEO that way either.  Maybe we should think of a country leadership like corporate leadership,  with board of directors which represents the interests of the stakeholders (the citizens), and a CEO that manages the country and being nominated by the board of directors (that can also send the CEO home anytime),  this is not really the same as a parliament system - of course, there are many details to sort.     We are educated that the western style democracy is an axiom, and that any deviation of it is dictatorship and bad for the people,  Singapore is a counter-example, while I will not claim that everything is bright in the Singapore system, the world does not consist of black and white, I was very impressed by what has been done in this island without natural resources over a relatively short period of time,  I think that the west has something to learn from Asia in more than one sense.    More - later 

On VLDB 2010 and the event processing tutorial

Still in Singapore,  after the vacation, this is VLDB time,  VLDB is one of the largest databases conferences, however databases is a large heterogeneous area, and I wonder if there is a single person who can understand all  talks.   The keynote talk by Divesh Saristava from AT&T Research talked about stream warehouses, or event stores in my language.  There were also some event processing related demos, and a stream research track, with one interesting talk that compared the semantics of Coral8 CCL language to this of Streambase and got to the (not surprising) conclusion that their semantics is different and similar queries would yield different results, then it tried to come up with a framework to generalize the two types of semantics, and they extend it to other languages.   I think that this is in line of the work we are doing on common model, and will follow up with them (they are from ETH Zurich) about collaboration on that one.


Today I have delivered a tutorial under the title "event processing - past, present and future",  much of it follows the EPIA book.    Since this is a database conference I opened in showing various opinions about the relations between event processing and data stream management, which is the name used in the database community, the various opinions are:

1.  They are aliases -- a stream is just a collection of events, likewise, an event is just a member in a stream, and the functionality is the same.
2. Stream management is a subset of event processing -- there are different ways to do event processing, streams is one of them
3. Event processing is a subset of stream management -- event streams is just one type of stream, but there are voice stream, video stream and more streams
4. Event processing and stream management are distinct and there is no overlapping between them.

As I have heard all four opinions about it,  I'll let you judge which is the right one. Hint:  option 4 is totally false, there is some truth in options 1-3, depending on the viewpoint.


Anyway - the tutorial has been uploaded to slideshare, and you can view it there. Enjoy.


Tomorrow is my last planned day in Singapore, and I'll write more about this very impressive country soon.