On data centric, decision centric, and situation centric - a response to Chris Taylor's "time and effort we waste on big data"

Some times there are scientific truths,  Nicolaus Copernicus coined the "heliocentric hypothesis", which states that the earth is revolving around the sun, and not vice versa.  His hypothesis was proved as a scientific facts.

The centric orientation is often a question for dispute, in a past post on this blog, I wrote about the dispute between Plato who advocated a society-centric approach, and Aristotle who advocated individual-centric approach.  

Chris Taylor recently wrote in the"Real-time & Complex Event Processing" site a post entitled: "The time and efforts we waste about big data".   Chris used the analog of "Tower of Babel"  and criticized the efforts invested in accumulating data within large warehouses, and the "data centric" approach, advocating another approach  "decision centric" approach. Stating ---  let's architect the "big data" around decisions, identify decisions required first, and then manage data as part of the decision architecture, making it decision centric.

  Let me add another view point here.  

 If we look at the sources of Big Data in 2015, we'll see the most of the data will come from sensors, and the second source is social media, where enterprise data which is the more familiar world became the minority.   If we look at the value of data the "Internet of Things",  one of its main values is the ability to detect situations and act upon them (in either reactive or proactive way).  Thus the center is neither data, nor decision, it is about situations, it becomes situation centric, and the architecture is around -- which situation we wish to identify, and then what data we need for that, and sometimes also what decisions we need when the situation is detected (note, the decision can be trivial, since when a situation occurs there is a single action associated with it, so it is not necessarily decision centric).

We have mentioned data-centric, decision-centric, and situation-centric.   Maybe one of the conclusions we can draw from Chris' analogy of "The Tower of Babel" is that there is no single viewpoint.  

Sometimes there is a need to accumulate data without a-priori knowledge what it will be used for. Medical data, for example, can be accumulated and lead to unexpected results, which will drive new type of decisions, and/or new situations we'll wish to identify.    In this case the data-centric approach is valid. 

In an organized world of structured processes with well-defined decisions, the decision-centric approach makes sense. As an example, when the main process is credit approval, this is a well-defined decision that centers both processes and data around it.

In the new world based on "Internet of Things" - situation-centric might become more dominant, and if we look at where big data really is -- we'll see more and more situation-centric in the universe.

Unlike the "heliocentric hypothesis" which is a scientific fact,  we don't have single scientific truth, but when anybody invests time and effort on big data, one has better to sort out what is the best value, instead of assuming that accumulating data is the value. 

Personalization - the next frontier

Back to DEBS 2014.  The last keynote speaker was Manish Gupta, who has been a colleague in IBM Research in the past, and now is is heading the Xerox research center in India.  Manish talked about personalization. He started the talk by saying that in the past everything was personalized - clothes, food, furniture. But only a few rich people could enjoy it.  The industrial revolution brought the mass production.

Indeed most products and services we consume are not tailored to our own individual needs, but rather standard on-the-shelf products.    We are now facing a departure from this mass production trend, and back into personalization.   Manish talked mainly about healthcare   Today, there is a tremendous progress in this area, enabling personalized treatment of some diseases, like personalized cancer treatment based on genetic patterns.  This is true in other areas of life.  We were exposed to personalized advertisement, but in most areas we are still in the mass production.   The current technology enables personalization by understanding individuals context on one hand, and classification of individuals on the other hand.  I'll write more about the technology about personalization, and how the combination of Internet of Things and personalization are changing the world, in subsequent posts. 

DEBS 2014 - the first two days

The picture was taken at the entrance to the computer science building in IIT Bombay where the DEBS 2014 conference is being held.  This is my first visit to India, and it is certainly different from anyplace else I've seen, I'll write about my impressions from India after I'll return.

The first day of the conference is the day of tutorials and PhD students section.   I have already written about my tutorial,  on the second half of the day Nenad Stojanovic delivered a tutorial about event processing on 

 mobile devices, following the start-up he is engaging in now. 

The second day started with the first keynote of Minos Garofalakis who talked about the work on reducing communication cost in stream processing by geometric reasoning.  I am familiar with this work that is done in collaboration with the Technion. Minos presented communication as the most scare resource that need to be optimized, but in answer to my question he admitted that this is only one of multiple factors that affect the performance.   

Other interesting talks were the one by Alessandro Margara about learning event processing rules.  The talk was interesting and his results look good,  however his work is restricted to very specific patterns and also to a derived event that is observable.   Many of the derived events are virtual, and the relationships between events that issue the pattern, and also the different dimensions of context, make it difficult in general to use machine learning techniques to automatically generate rules, and I think it is still largely an open issue.

Beate Ottenwälder gave a talk about reuse of patterns for optimization purpose.  This might be useful in some cases (where there are overlaps between patterns). 

 In the beginning of the day the organizers presented some statistics about countries from where the submissions sent from, and for accepted papers.   Not surprisingly, Germany is the largest country of activities in this area - both in submission and acceptance.  This year the acceptance rate was 9%, the lowest ever for the conference.  The organizers also presented some metrics about citations of the conference that are coming close to the major conferences and journals in the distributed computing area. 

More on DEBS 2014 - later.  

My talk in DEBS 2014 on the Internet of Everything

I am writing this post from the hotel "Meluha the Fern" in Mumbai.  Arrived here on Friday and had also an opportunity to do some sightseeing. Will write my impressions from Mumbai at a later phase.

Today DEBS 2014 started, the conference is being held in IIT Bombay.   The first day has been the tutorial day. I have delivered (by myself, my co-authors did not arrive) a tutorial on the "Internet of Everything".

This is the next in the tradition of tutorials that I am giving in DEBS since 2008.   As usual I have posted the tutorial on slideshare.  The problem with the slideshare conversion is that it messes up the animations, but I guess that it is readable anyway.  I'll write about the rest of the conference soon.  Enjoy!

Do we need Asimov's laws?

MIT Technology Review discusses to a recent article entitled "Do we need Asimov laws" by Ulrike Barthelmess and Ulrich Furbach from University Koblenz.    The Asimov laws celebrate now 50 years and this triggered some discussion.  For anybody who forgot (or never read Asimov - my most favorite author), the three laws of Asimov are: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a 

human being to come to harm. 

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except 

where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection 

does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Actually in a later book Asimov made an exception and defined a zeroth law that puts the benefit of humanity above these laws.  

In the science fiction literature, a notable resistance to these laws are shown in the trilogy by Roger Mcbride Allen in the trilogy started with Caliban.

The article discusses that the three laws were dealing with different fears of people from the concept of robots, and asserts that the three laws were not implemented in reality neither in the autonomous vehicles projects nor in other robotic settings.   Furthermore there were other claims that Asimov's three laws cannot protect us.    Today robots also used for military purposes, and thus are by definition contradict Asimov's ideal about Robots as peace generators.       The authors set a moral principle: 

   "It is not allowed to build and to use robots which violate  Asimov’s first law!" 

Actually a counter opinion is that it is better to jeopardize a robot than to jeopardize a human in combat situation, the implementation of this moral law has nothing to do with robots, it has to do with the culture of settling disputes in violent way, this is what should be eliminated - but this is another story! 

PEW Research report on the Internet of Things in 2025

PEW Research center published this week a comprehensive report  entitled: "The Internet of Things will strive by 2025".   This report is based on a survey that 1600 responders participate in.

I have copied the Table of Contents of that report:

I am now working on a three hours tutorials on Internet of Everything that I plan to deliver in DEBS 2014 in Mumbai. 

On the shareholder value myth

I came across a small booklet entitled "The Shareholder value myth" by Lynn Stout.   I now have the privilege to look at the corporate world now from the outside so I can write more freely from my academic seat now.   The book starts with the assertion that during the last 20 years there is a common practice to see the "shareholder value" as the only consideration in corporates' strategy.  Actually when I studied in an MBA program in the early eighties,  we learned that there are multiple stakeholders: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators and the social environment, and the management needs to balance the interests.    Since that time the equation has changed to have shareholder as the primary stakeholder. The main thesis of this book is that this is actually a wrong thing to do, since it biases towards short term (the speculative shareholder vs. the long-term shareholder).  Since the author is a professor of law, she starts by legal claims that disputes the common thinking that the shareholders own the corporate, and discusses the relations between these two entities.  She claims that the current economy takes it to extreme by saying that the goal of maximizing the value for shareholders is a goal the justifies all means to achieve it. Stout claims that this kind of thinking is typical for psychopaths, and that most people, thus most shareholders are not psychopaths.

The consequences according to Stout are damaging to corporates, employees, customers and society.  The drive for short-term results, fueled by linking senior executives compensation to short term goals, and cutback of R&D, employee benefits, and quality and affordability for customers.    It also triggers unethical behavior.  The good news according to Stout is that we see first signs that this paradigm starts to decline, however the "Wall Street" culture is still quite pervasive. 

I'll write more opinion about socio-economical issues in time -- still learning it!