My recent talk in ETH

I used a spoiler of the movie "Source Code" as the opening slide to my recent talk in ETH.   The presentation now is uploaded on slideshare.   Enjoy! 

On smart computing

 I realized that I have not posted in this Blog for two weeks,  I have not really disappeared;  I am involved in a proposal for EU project, and last Tuesday we had the "hearings", which is the second phase of decision about  who will win --- the competition is very tough, and we invested a lot in preparation - in fact, never in my life I spent so much time and energy in preparing to a one hour meetings,  as for the details -- if we'll win this project I'll write more about it.  One detail:  the meeting took place in Luxembourg, where many houses look like palaces (see picture above). 


For now -  catching up with some stuff that was published in the last couple of weeks,  I came across a  Forresters' article about smart computing.    Chris Mines from Forrester writes that smart computing is the next big things and viewing the planned investments of organizations, as seen in the figure below, many of the planned investments are in this area:

The claim is that smart is the next big thing - and mentions three points (copied from the posting)

• Improving transactional processes is yesterday's story. The back-office challenges of preparing financial statements, fulfilling customer orders, or tracking inventory are well addressed by enterprise and personal productivity software. These traditional workloads are migrating to cloud computing resources in some cases, but are not creating incremental technology investments nor opportunities to transform how a business operates.
• Optimizing assets is the next important challenge. Especially in service-based industries, favorable economics result from building an asset base and then selling access to those assets in the form of services. Managing and optimizing the use of those assets -- physical, human, financial, and intangible -- is the source of revenue growth and improved margins. Smart computing systems provide the awareness, analytics, and actions required to improve the utilization of a firm's assets. And in most cases, these systems represent incremental investments in computing resource, with the payback coming in the form of more efficient, more highly utilized, and therefore more profitable assets.
• Smart flexes to meet industry-specific challenges. Each industry has a different mix of assets with different optimization opportunities. In high-tech, development and channel resources must be marshaled in the face of accelerating development cycles, long supply chains, and unpredictable consumer tastes. In finance, mountains of data must be sifted to find the best investment opportunities, while managing market and compliance risk and keeping employees productive. Finding the right mix of online and brick-and-mortar, the right product portfolio, and lean inventories are paramount for retail execs. The right portfolio of smart computing solutions will vary widely across these and other industries

This is in line with my previous posting about the new world vs. the old world, we are in the new world, and the IT industry is gradually shifting towards this new world.     Optimizing assets (traffic, power, human) is certainly part of the game,  eliminating problems before they happen (proactive computing) is another aspect.

Event processing as reducer in Map Reduce

A relatively recent posting from MSFT.   In this posting there is a question about the relationship between the batch oriented Map Reduce,  and the on-line oriented event processing.   The answer, according to MSFT is - event processing can be used as a reducer in the Map Reduce, where there are multiple copies of an event processing engine perform the reduce function.


I have written before about offline event processing,  with the insight that event processing is useful not only in online, but in offline, since it provides both efficient implementation and high-level abstraction in certain functions (pattern matching, aggregation and more) that makes it also attractive to use in batch.  


Of course, another synergy may be using event processing within real-time hadoop, like Darkstar.  as is frequently articulated by Colin Clark.    

EPTS activities in 2012

In Wednesday we held an open conference call of EPTS members.  The call discussed EPTS activities for 2012.  While in the past EPTS concentrated in working groups that have created glossary, reference architecture, investigated use cases and languages, and some other stuff, the idea is that in 2012 EPTS will attempt to address larger audience by creating online magazine which will consist of:  news (including connecting to social media),  general material about event processing (starting point: FAQ taken from analysts in this area),  and industry specific content.   We are now looking for volunteers to set up all aspects: orchestrating the content ("editorial board"),  soliciting readers and topics they are interested ("reach out board"), and a coordinator for sponsorship and advertisements.    Anybody interested to participate - please let me know.   I'll post updates in this Blog

Book review: The Live Web by Phil Windley

I am browsing through the book "The Live Web" by  Phil Windley, whose sub-title is "Building Event-Based Connections in the Cloud".   Phil sent me the book (with handwritten dedication), and starting from the back cover I liked his motivating examples: "Imagine a world in which your phone automatically mutes the ringer when you start watching a movie" (actually today my mobile phone rang when I was giving a talk, forgot to mute it) or another one  "imagine a workd in which your alarm clock sets itself based on your schedule and other information like weather, traffic, and your past behavior" (I don't need much sleep so getting up early without alarm clock, and some members of my family have the habit to turn of the alarm clock and get back to sleep, but I am sure it is helpful for some people). 
This reminds me of many examples that I used over the years to explain either event processing or autonomic computing (e.g. the refrigerator invited the technician and more).   Phil's answer to realize these scenarios is what he calls "the live web", which according to him is the evolution beyond Web 2.0 which is still static web. I think terms like "the active Internet" or "The event web" was used before in a similar context.  Much of the book deal with projection of event processing to the web interfaces,and working in web environment. Some of it is dedicated to events, their semantics, and operations around them.  He also dedicates chapter to the current hot topics - cloud and mobile and connects them to the story of the live web.   Phil also founded a start-up called Kynetx to implement these ideas, the book also describes their system and language in detail.
Overall - interesting book, both for those who want to understand the principles and those who wish to drill down on the details of how to build such applications (or learn the Kynetx stuff)...   It is also another book that explain the principle of programming with events -- although we somewhat different perspectives of the other books. 

On transdisiciplinary education

One of my IBM colleagues, Jim Spohrer, the IBM University Relations Director,  has written about the need of students to receive transdisciplinary education.   Indeed we find more and more that doing things require not just multidisciplinary skills, of people from several disciplines working together, but also transdisciplinary skills, where people have good skills in several disciplines and a single person knows how to integrate these disciplines.  This is, of course, contrary to the academic tradition, where promotion processes for faculty members advocate the association with a single well-defined discipline.    We can see much more  transdisciplinary programs today then 20 years ago.  I believe that a program in which a student learns combination of computer science with another discipline (biology, business, mechanical engineering, cognitive psychology and more...),  not only at the intersection between the disciplines, but rather at the union, of having deep understanding in both disciplines as the type of skills required in the marketplace.  
  

The pilot decision making process

While surfing the web to find something,  through the wonders of Google search, I reached the site of the Langley flying school and came across the illustration above under the title "the pilot decision making process". 
The cycle starts with a situation, which is defined as a critical situation which requires action.   The detection and identification of such a situation is what starts the process, thus the decision process is inherently event driven, then the pilot needs to assess the options,  sometimes the options are very obvious, and sometimes there is a creativity in that process,  then there is a need to chose among the options, act according to the selected action and assess whether the situation has been resolved.   Note that this may be either reactive (situation already happened) or proactive (situation is expected to happen).  Of course, when possible it is better to be proactive, it is much better to eliminate crash of the aircraft then try to rescue the crew and passengers when the crash already happened, both from economic point of view and from safety to human life point of view.     Note that the pilot needs to react to critical situations, for the process-driven business as usual case, an autonomic pilot is sufficient.    Can we extend the autonomic pilot also to deal with critical situations?