On time perception - depends who you are

I have not written in the last 12 days -- some of it were vacation in Eilat (a resort town in Israel near the Red Sea) and some just lazy time -- holiday period is over, tomorrow - back to work!   Back also to the Blog writing -- I was always fascinated by the notion of time, and wondered if everybody has the same perception of time.  Today I came across an article in the science and technology section of Economics - dealing with time perception within different animals.   It turns out that there is a metrics to measure the perception of time, which is called CFF-  critical flicker-fusion frequency that has to do with the frequency in which the eyes can refresh an image and thus determine the rate at which the information arrives to the brain.   The human CFF is 60HZ  (so 60 refreshes per second).    The movies and TV are adjusted to this frequency.   A dog's CFF is 80HZ, thus according to the article, it does not have interest in TV movies, since there is a mismatch which makes the movie to be out of sync.     A fly has  CFF of 250HZ which is a biological advantage, because a fly can react faster to threats and opportunities -- thus a movement we do towards capturing a fly seems as a slow motion movement to the fly and thus it can easily escape.   The different perception of time depends on the CFF, what we grasp as a second, a fly grasps as 4.15 seconds, and thus it subjective time perception is that it lives much longer than the time we perceive it living.   On the other side of the spectrum turtles have CFF of 15 HZ, thus one second in our time seems to a turtle like quarter of a second thus a turtle thinks that it actually moves fast...   Anyway -- can we take advantage of this to process events in different frequencies to provide different views of the universe?  I think that the potential of it should  be investigated..  

On six years of blogging

Recently the Blog has completed six years.   A lot of things happened during this time,  buzzwords have come and gone, and the understanding of event thinking has been sharpened over time as the hype cycle progresses.   Looking at Google Analytics' statistics,  the most popular postings in this blog are:

1. On unicorn, professor and infant - a debate about event processing and analytics.  The topic of the relationships between event processing and various kind of analytics (a buzzword by its own right) are still popular and relevant.

2. On family trees - this was an off-topic post, that talked about a passover vacation in which I spent a few days tracking the roots of my family. 

3. On Dave Mayer's keynote in DEBS 2012 - this one is relatively recent, and was the champion of the last year's posts.  It talks about the phenomenon of re-inventing wheels, and in particular, Dave Mayer in his DEBS 2012 keynote invented frames which have large overlap with the notion of context.  

As for visitors - totally over the years more than 150,000 distinct readers have passed through the blog, around 3000 have visited at least 200 times.  The countries with most visitors are (in descending order):  USA, UK, Germany, India, Israel, Canada, Philippines, France, Australia and Japan  (I don't know anybody from Philippines... so will be interesting to get a feedback from a reader of that location).   The cities with most visitors are: London, New York, Tel-Aviv,  Bangalore, Manila, Paris, Singapore, Karlsruhe,   and Sydney. 

The most popular referencing site is the almighty google, but there are also many references from complexevent.com, manning.com and TIBCOblogs.

Next yer's Blog will continue to follow the trends and opinions, and will get deeper on my current work about event modeling - after we'll publicly expose it in ER 2013 (November, Hong Kong).

I always wonder why people are reading what I am writing - but the several hundreds of readers per day encourage me to continue...  although I have been written less recently  ( a matter of mood)..

On the reactive manifesto

Today I am writing from Luxembourg, where I participated in the negotiation meetings of two EU projects that are being launched.   I'll write about them when they will actually signed.  

Not far from here, in  Dagstuhl 2010, we worked on the "event processing manifesto" .   Today I discovered another manifesto that I think can be tracked to EPFL in Laussanne (not completely sure since the manifesto authors don't identify themselves), the manifesto is called "The REACTIVE MANIFESTO"  and is dated July 15, 2013.   The picture above is copied from the manifesto, and as you can see they define REACTIVE as event-driven, scalable, resilient, and interactive.   I wonder what is the background and motivation about it,  perhaps one of this Blog readers will be able to shed light...

Gartner's Hype cycle on emerging technologies 2013

Hype cycles time of the year, and Gartner published the emerging technologies hype cycle for 2013. 

Some insights: 

1.  "Complex Event Processing" is still near the peak of inflated  expectations, actually moved a little bit below the peak.  This means that it started the process of filtering out the hype, and getting to realistic contributions.
2. On the analytics front -- predictive analytics is now at the plateau of productivity, and on its way to being a commodity, while prescriptive analytics is on the rise, but still in the innovation phase.
3. Human augmentation, brain-computer interface, quantum computing and mobile robots are on the rise.  In fact, the Gartner's press release emphasizes the human - machine relationships.
4. In adjacent technologies to event processing; Internet of Things is getting closer to the peak, In memory DB and context analytics are also getting past the hype peak. 
5. Big data is still in the height of the hype --- as we saw in other sources,  it is now recognized as a catch-all hype, and I guess that it spawn several distinct concepts in the future.
6.   Mobile phones/tablets etc are not mentioned explicitly as part of the emerging technologies, I guess that mobile by itself is not a technology -- it has influence on all other technologies (the same as the WEB is not a technology).

New market research on the event processing market by Markets&Markets

It seems that there is a new comprehensive market research on the event processing market in the years 2013-2018 by Markets and Markets.  I don't have the market research itself (it is quite expensive), but the site gives some details, according to the report,  Markets&Markets forecast that  the "CEP  market"  is expected to grow from $764.5 million in 2013 to $3,322.0 million in 2018.  I wonder what this figures represent, it seems that this is beyond the accumulative sales of event processing platforms. 

They also classify the market according to the following verticals: 

BFSI: algorithmic trading, electronic transaction monitoring, dynamic pretrade analytics, data enrichment, fraud detection, governance, risk and compliance (GRC); 

Transportation and Logistics: asset management and predictive scheduling and toll system management; healthcare: self-service proactive monitoring and alerting and governance, risk and compliance (GRC); 

Telecommunication: mobile billboards, revenue assurance, network infrastructure monitoring and predictive CDR assessment; 

Retail: inventory optimization, shoplifting detection and real-time marketing and customer engagement; 

Energy and utilities: oil and gas operation management and nuclear crisis and smart grid energy management; 

Manufacturing: shop floor automation and operational failure detection, infrastructure management and supply chain optimization; 

Government, defense and aerospace: Intelligence and Security, emergency response services and geo-fencing and geospatial analysis; 

Others: includes education and research

Hope to get more insight towards this research. 

On concept computing - take one

We think in concepts.  We study concepts, we reason about concepts.   

Now we also have "concept computing", the term was coined by Mills Davis.  It does not appear in Wikipedia yet, but it is an interesting and useful idea.  Mills Davis uploaded his AAAI keynote talk on Slideshare recently, and the slides below is taken from there.   The work we are doing now is somewhat the projection of this idea for the event-driven world.  I'll write about it in the future.  Meanwhile -- this presentation is recommended 

Big data analytics will never replace creative thought

The claim expressed in the title of this posting is the title of  a piece in "Data Quality News" by Richard Jones.   It claims that the "data craze" - the conception that data mining alone is sufficient to get decisions in all areas, is a misconception in some areas.  Jones provides two examples:  marketing - where statistical reasoning gives a great value, but it deals with the small details, however  human creative thinking deals with the big picture, and data mining alone cannot get it,  and healthcare - again, data mining can be of great value, but interactions with the patient and personal examination by a physician is vital.    
I guess that the research into AI should also deal with how to create artificially creative thinking.  As I've written before Noam Chomsky has criticized the AI community by making statistical reasoning its mainstream and deserted the strive for  "solid model of the universe" .  I guess that after some disillusionment from the "data craze" the industry will settle on getting data mining its right place, as a supporting technology.

More on this - later.