On security challenges of the Internet of Things

I was asked by one of the leading security companies to come and talk with its technical leaders about the security challenges of the Internet of Things, which I believe is one of the major challenges in this area.  Here are my thoughts on my weekly column in RTInsights.

On Processing Future Events

One of the main characteristics of intelligent real-time systems is their ability to process future events. Here are some thoughts in my weekly column on RTInsights. 

On Real Time

Some thoughts about the term "Real-time"  in my weekly column in the Real-time Insights.

Real time insights, the real-timer and the blog

I have not written in this Blog for a while, but am returning now to Blogging (I have been quite active in micro-blogging on Facebook and Twitter, though)..

Actually I am now into three types of Blogging.



The first one is this Blog: it will always be my "home" personal Blog, and in which I'll continue to write personal posts, and provide links to the other blog that I am writing about now the "real-timer".

A couple of years ago we started an Internet magazine called "RTInsights" and published a couple of issues on pilot basis.   Now we are back at RTInsights, in a new form as a website described as follows:

"RTInsights is an independent expert-driven web resource singularly focused on helping senior business and IT professionals accelerate their business with real-time insights. 
RTInsights provides a forum for business, IT and research professionals to learn from other people's experiences, glean insights from independent expert opinions, discover new developments, and follow relevant industry and vendor news. We are dedicated to helping you understand what it takes to accelerate your business by transforming your culture, processes and systems to real-time, thereby driving significant business value in your organization.

Our technology coverage includes the application of business analytics, big data, Internet of Things, cloud infrastructure, Event processing, intelligent BPM and decision management, and any other critical technologies for operating your business in real-time.  Our in-depth specialized content is provided by expert analysts, consultants and enterprise practitioners focused on the real-time enterprise."   

 My role in RTInsights is twofold:  I am writing a weekly post under the "Real-timer", which will provide professional opinions on the area of RTInsights.  There are couple of posts there, one old and one new.    The old one is entitled: "Flying Forward, Looking Backward: Statistical analysis of the past is not enough to navigate the future".    The new one is entitled: "Reversing the Roles".  

The other role is "International Technical Editor" in which I'll cover applications, activities, and companies in this area outside the USA, with an emphasis on developing countries.  

If you wonder where is the third activity of Blogging.  It is quite different one, a relatively new Blog in which I post my own attempts at poetry in Hebrew, though the Blog has a Latin name.

More - later.   

2014 -- A year of change

2014 was for me a year of change, actually many changes...  I have written less in this Blog this year, average of one post per week, while in the past I used to post every couple of days..  Made a note to myself to get better at this in 2015...    

The main nominal change was the change.  In February I wrote a post in this Blog entitled "moving on"  where I reported on career change, after long period in IBM Research I have taken a position to lead societal-academic initiative called "The Institute of Technological Empowerment".  This is a different world,  different in mentality, different in content, and different in the surrounding environment.    The lifestyle is different. I used to go to the office in the morning, spend all day either in my own office or in conference room and get out of work while it is dark outside.  Today there are not two similar days:  I have a nice office (which looks like a combination of a library and art gallery), but I don't go there every day.  I spend a lot of time in meetings outside. I am travelling a lot and driving a lot.  Meeting new people of types I never met -- politicians, educators, artists, media people, subject matter experts in various areas such as agriculture, gerontology, traditional industries etc...  Gaining a new work partners, some of them are amazing people very different from the people I used to work...    

Working now on things related to education and activities to enrich high-school students in the Israeli periphery, something quite remote from what I've done, and getting to some new ideas in multi-disciplinary research...  

Many starts, and 2015 will be a year to accomplish many of the starts....  very curious to read what I'll write a year from today... 

CEP Market players - end of 2014 - from Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent published the new instance of his series on the genealogy of event processing players, as seen in the picture above.   Note that it includes also streaming platforms like STORM which is not an event processing tool per se, but a platform on which event processing functionality can be programmed.  Such platforms are indeed the most notable shift from previous versions.  

Starting my own radio show

When asked what do you want to do when you grow up, some people say they want to be pilots, and some say they want to be firefighters.  I was a strange kid and said: I want to work in the radio,  

The years passed and I have gone into computer programming and then into other areas around information technology and gave up my childhood dream, but did not forget it.

A few months ago I discovered that there is a regional radio station located in the campus of the college I am working in. I approached the station manager with the idea to have my own radio show in which I am hosting interesting people talking about technology, societal activities, and the bridge between them.   She agreed to record a pilot and take it from there.    I have recorded three  sessions, and then an opening session, interviewing me (in the picture), and then this week the program went live.    Until this year I have never participated in a radio program, neither as host nor as a participant. Earlier this year I have been interviewed twice in two different radio stations about the activity of the Institute of Technological Empowerment,  Actually I prefer the role of host, it is a lot of fun!. 
Here is a picture in which I am hosting my first interviewer, Rami Gazit.

It is never late to fulfill the childhood dreams....

For those who can read Hebrew, all details are in the Facebook page of the program.    

More on storytelling

Ramesh Jain has uploaded his presentation on objective storytelling from the ACM multimedia conference last week.    Ramesh introduces the notion of personicle as "personal chronicle". This notion stands for a collection of events that describe the story of a single person in a specific time context (day, year etc...).  A story is a collection of events that are represented in multimedia fashion, where currently digital pictures are the dominant way of representation.    The objective story is the collection of events documenting the story.  

This is an interesting concept, and I intend to look at the notion of events creating stories also in other areas where events, the interaction between events, and stories interact.   For example: creative adaptive stories using event flows.   I'll write more about this topic at a later phase. 

On the huevent'14 workshop at ACM Multimedia 2014

This is me looks small standing near a slide from my presentation at the huevent'14 workshop.  This was kind of a keynote talk so I could talk for an hour (which is better than a typical conference talk of 20 minutes).  My talk is similar to some recent talks and can be found on slideshare. 

One new thing is that  I have cited a recent post by Chris Curan entitled: "12 hurdles hampering the Internet of Things".    There is also a position paper co-authored with Fabiana Fournier that is available through the ACM digital library. 

An interesting keynote given by Ramesh Jain on storytelling.  Ramesh views a story as a flow of events. This is an interesting concept. I guess that the relationship among events is a function of the genre.  For documentary  story events are coming in a sequence of chronological order, in a detective story, the crime is an event, and later events are relating backwards to previous events in the way to solve the mystery.   Other stories have other patterns.  This is an interesting topic to investigate further, and I'll continue to do so in the framework of the work on creative skills which is part of the agenda of my institute.      More about this - later 

The Institute of Technological Empowerment -- Newsletter in English

The start of the school year marked also the launch of eight projects within the framework of the institute of technological empowerment.  Typically we report on the activities in Hebrew since most of the stakeholders are in Israel, however it is time to issue a newsletter in English for all the international readers who might be interested in this.  The newsletter reflects the current status at the beginning of November 2014.   

Michael Jordan on the delusions of big data

Michael Jordan (the one from Berkeley, not the basketball player) gave an interesting interview to IEEE Spectrum.  it is recommended to read his own words. 

Some of the highlights of Jordan's opinions are:

1. Using brain metaphors for computing is misleading:   computing does not work like the brain, this is also includes one of Jordan's expertise areas - neural nets.
2. He says that the advances in computer vision lead us to be able to solve some kind of useful problems, but we are very far from giving machine the vision capabilities of a human
3. "Big Data" is over-promising.  One can prove many false hypotheses using big data methods.  This is similar to building bridges without a theory of how to build bridges,  some may  survive, and some will collapse... 
4. If he will have $1B to spend on research, he will invest in natural languages processing...

I think that it adds to some other observations about the overhype of "big data" (for example, see my posting on Noam Chomsky's opinion couple of years ago, or Tim Harford's recent article). 

The Physical Web - by Google

Google recently revealed the "Physical Web" project.  This project is aimed at "interaction on demand" which will be a standard way that everybody will be able to consume data from devices connected to the Internet (AKA "Internet of Things") without the intervention of applications.   
This idea reminds of the idea of the grand challenge posed by the Event Processing Manifesto that was the result of the Dagstuhl seminar in 2010 and talked about "event fabric".     The "event fabric" challenge went further than get events on demand and also included processing event patterns on demand which I believe will be the next step to create access for everybody.  The ability to compose patterns on demand by everybody is a key to making this real-time data useful and complete the IoT revolution....  I am planned to give a talk related to this idea in early November in a workshop adjacent to the ACM Multimedia conference in Orlando... Will write more on this later...

On the history of STORM by Nathan Marz

Nathan Marz, the guy that is behind the Storm Apache incubator project.
Storm has definitely became the most common stream processing platform.  This year I am scheduled to teach a course about business intelligence, and my view of business intelligence includes the real-time business intelligence.  The students will practice Storm. 

Recently Nathan Marz wrote in his Blog about the history of Storm and lessons learned. 
I think it is worth reading... 

Some insights from the talk of Richard Soley in the IoT summit in INTEROP

The opening speaker in the IoT summit yesterday was Richard Soley, the person behind Object Management Group.  Richard talked about the "industrial Internet". He started his talk by having a nice slide in which the Internet now substitutes many thing we have done in the past

However, not everything changed by the Internet, since in many cases enterprises lack the "Internet thinking".  Examples are: manufacturing, energy grids, jet engines, oil and gas exploration and more are handled exactly as were done before.

This is due to the fact that the people involved including technical people are stuck in the way of thinking of the past.

Richard talked about the Industrial Internet Consortium which is a separate entity and not part of OMG (a correction that Richard made to my original posting). 
It has 85 members (at the time of the talk) and growing.  It is intended to study testbeds  in this area.  The Internet of Things is a crucial component in the industrial internet game.

One more insight from Richard is that "people don't read".  Everybody re-invents the wheel, since the current generation of professional people don't read and are not familiar with the state of the practice.  This is consistent with our finding in the event processing area where people prefer to reinvent the wheel and don't even know the wheel exists.  Another perspective of Richard's talk you can find in the article by Chris Taylor, who was the session organizer.   

My talk in INTEROP 2014

My talk on Internet of Things and Personalization is available on Slideshare.  This is a shorter variation (with some additions) of my DEBS'14 tutorial.  Enjoy!
I am also planned to deliver a variation of this talk twice more this week: in IBM Research at Yorktown Heights,  and in Stony Brooks University. 

I'll write more insights from the other talks - later. 

On the Proasense project

I have not written for a while... Busy days.  I'll write about my daily work in other opportunity.

Last week I've spent a couple of days in Athens, Greece, as a member of the advisory board of the Proasense project.  This project deals with proactive computing, which a paradigm that I have been advocating  for several years.  There are now couple of EU projects I know (the other one is Speedd) in the proactive space.  The proactive idea is that problems can be eliminated or mitigated before they happen.   The Proasense project employs two interesting use cases: one in the manufacturing area, and the other in the oil drilling area, an application that we have investigated a couple of years ago.

I am still in the opinion that proactive computing will be a major paradigm in the future, and will follow this project during the next couple of years with interest.   

On Fog Computing

Cisco that advocated the term "Internet of Everything" is now advocating the term "Fog Computing". these terms are related.    According to Cisco the cloud computing model is being replaced by the fog model.   
While in cloud computing all computation is done in a remote computing center, in fog computing the computation is distributed between local processing ("at the edge of the network") and remote processing. The relationship to the sensor world is straightforward.   A site might have multiple sensors. Some of the processing can be processed locally, and some need to be processed in a remote place, furthermore, this may be dynamic and tuned in real-time.   The picture above shows the before (cloud model) and after (fog model).   The example is energy system.  There may be processing done in a processor located in a single house which takes into considerations all sensors installed in the house.  There are other types of processing that related to data from multiple houses and need to be processed in a place where all data is available.  

Note that nothing is really new (besides the names).  Cloud computing is a new name for an old computing model that was once called "service bureau".  In the past the "cloud" was a single mainframe, and the edge where collection of dumb terminals.  Now the cloud is a grid, and the edge has processing power, but the principle is the same.    Fog is also an old principle of distributing the work reminding of N-tier middleware. 

I guess that the fog model is indeed more appropriate for IoT scenario than cloud model, in some of the projects that we are now planning within the Institute of Technological Empowerment,  are indeed fog based.  The sensors are going to be communicating with a local processor (which may be as simple as a tablet) with some processing done on the local processor, and some on the cloud.  This brings us back to the idea of event processing on mobile.   

After cloud and fog, we are waiting also for some - wind, rain, and sleet.... 

Gartner hype cycle July 2014

Gartner published its hype cycle report recently.   The "Internet of Things" is now at the top of the hype cycle, defined as "peak of inflated expectation".   "Big Data" which has been there before, and now moved down the line of disillusionment.   Another hype in the height is the "natural language question answering" that was hyped by IBM's Watson.   In the upwords side we can see among other things: software-defined anything, connected home, and prescriptive analytics.    Note that in the right-hand side there are technologies which are considered mature, such as: speech recognition, enterprise 3D printings and in-memory analytics.  "Complex event processing" is moving slowly down the disillusionment path. 

My upcoming talk in INTEROP, September 29, NYC

I was invited to give a talk in the Internet of Things summit that will take place in INTEROP, in NYC September 29. 

My talk will be about "The Internet of Things and Personalization", the area I am investigating nowadays.

Other speakers will be  Richard Soley, CEO of OMG, and John Morris, VP of ComplexIT. 
The moderator is Chris Taylor from TIBCO, a well known writer in this area.

Anybody that wishes to meet me in the NYC area during that week - please let me know. 

Book review: The Decline and Fall of IBM

Since I spent more than 16 years in IBM, I read with interest a small book authored by Robert Cringley, a journalist that has investigated the insides of IBM during the last few years. The title is a paraphrase on the famous book: "The decline and fall of the Roman Empire", and indeed when I was young and IBM dominated the IT market it looked like the Roman Empire from the outside.  Cringley starts by surveying IBM's history , getting to Lou Gerstner period where he saved IBM for a while,  while he mentions the good things that Gerstner did for IBM he also mentions some of his mistakes:  building competitive services arm using cheaper labor, which deteriorated the quality, the second mistake is selling the networking business to AT&T, and the biggest mistake according to Cringley is nominating Sam Palmisano to be his successor.

His main criticism is indeed addressed at Palmisano by taking the "shareholder only" approach to extreme (I have written before about the shareholder value myth).  Maximizing the shareholder value, and the "2015 roadmap" making the $20 Earning Per Share as the only game in town.  Kringley claims that by doing it IBM became a cash cow,  Meeting the 2015 roadmap involves financial engineering, such as spending $101 Billion dollars on buying back around third of its shares, inflating the value artificially, moreover, IBM does it with borrowed money.  The problem is not only the financial aspect, constants cutbacks in workforce hurt the quality of service of IBM to customers, and IBM suffered various contract cancellations. He also criticises the HR aspect, IBM is calling its employees "resources" and the workforce reduction is called "resource action".   My note:  once when I worked in IBM we had a meeting of HR director from the USA with all manager, and when she kept talking about people as "resources", one of my colleagues remarked that in the Israeli culture is considered as a big insult, like calling person "it" in English. She tried her best to use the term "people" or "employees", but it was difficult for her, since she really thinks on people as resources, however, people don't like to be treated as resources, and the current policies create a dissonance between the upper management and many employees. Finally he analyzes the areas where IBM is active:  hardware, software, services, analytics, mobile and cloud, analyzes IBM problems in each of the area, and talks about possible solution.    The author's conclusion is quite pessimistic for the future of IBM unless the current CEO Ginni Rommety will make fundamental changes.  He also brings a lot of letters from insiders to reinforce his opinions.

As a veteran IBMer, many of the things he talked about were familiar to me.  I am not qualified to judge IBM strategy,  but there is a general sentiment  among many people inside IBM that is consistent with his conclusions.  However, I believe that IBM which survived more than 100 years will survive this, but probably it will need another Gerstner-like person to get it out of the box it is now...