On Dynamic M2M Event Processing

M2M is one of the realizations of the Internet of Things which attracts a lot of work recently.  Event Processing is in the core of such applications. They don't work in the traditional Internet model of - store and search, but they are intended to alert or act now.     
An interesting presentation from Eclipse Con 2014 (planned for March 2014) is entitled "On  Dynamic M2M Event Processing".  This presentation (marked as a draft) is  by  Hitachi and Oracle.    It talks about event processing within remote devices embedded within   the OSGi component model.  Worth reading -- and we'll see a lot more in this direction. 

On ER 2013

This week I have spent several days in Hong Kong attending the ER 2013 conference.  I have attended this conference several times before, but not recently, and came back due to the fact that I have renewed interest in conceptual modeling due to my work on event modeling.    It was interesting to observe what are the key topics today in conceptual modeling research.    The keynote speakers by  David Embley. Surajit Chauduri and Marie-Aude Aufaure have all dealt with conceptual modeling in big data, enterprise analytics and business intelligence, so this seems to be the key interesting topics. Other topics were the classic topics like: business process modeling, data semantics, and ontology based modeling.     Conceptual modeling has contributed as means of providing abstractions over computing and data, where modeling play a vital role in the current IT industry, moreover, we see standards emerging in various areas such as BPMN and recently DMN.   You can look at the conference program to get a feeling on the various presentation.   This was my 5th visit in Hong Kong over the last 9 years and this place has its own charm.   

The event model - first exposure

Yesterday,at the ER 2013 conference in  Hong Kong, I have delivered a tutorial whose title was "modeling in the event-driven world".   This has been a first exposure of the work we have been doing entitled "the event model"  The main motivation behind this work is the observation that the next frontier in the event processing area is not to provide, but to overcome the complexity of event processing logic.   The main idea is to raise the center of gravity from the code level to the modeling level and aspire for radical simplification and making event processing logic accessible to larger audiences.  I'll write a series of blog posts around this model in the next few weeks.   
For a start - anybody who is interested in this topic can look at the tutorial's slides on Slideshare.

Enjoy! 

More - later. 

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.