My 2010

In 2010 I have posted less entries in this blog, relative to 2008 and 2009, 128 postings, roughly once every three days. Maybe I've been busier, and maybe I've been lazier - probably the combination of these two. 

The happiest day of the year was surprisingly the day in August when I've returned from a family vacation in western Canada and found two things that got by mail:   

12 copies of the book EPIA that fresh out of press (I have already gave 10 of them as a present, left 2 for myself - one at home and one in the office); the EPIA book was a major task for 18 months, so I was relieved to see it in print, at some points it fell like never-ending saga. 

 

The second item that arrived it the same day is a plaque designating the fact that I've received an IBM corporate award, which is the highest award that IBM gives,  the order of the events was somewhat funny: first I got the plaque in the mail, two weeks later I got a letter signed by IBM's CEO, which notifying me that I am receiving the award, two weeks later than the list of awards was publicly published, and then after six more weeks there was the award granting ceremony, giving me again the plaque I got in August.

Another notable event was the Dagstuhl seminar on event processing in May 2010.   We are now in the final phase of editing the end result of this team work.  Dagstuhl is a wonderful place, and we had a very good team there spending  5 days in dealing with the present and future of event processing.

I had some trips abroad - both business and pleasure.   Unlike most years I spent only four days in the USA in October, for the OMG financial market conference,  spent two and half weeks in a family vacation in Western Canada,   here is a picture with my daughter Daphna somewhere in the Canadian Rockies.

Another trip was to VLDB in Singapore, with a couple of days vacation in Hong-Kong on the way, and several days vacation in Singapore.

Here is a picture from Hong-Kong's wax museum,  where I am photographed with an old friend.

Here are two pictures from Singapore, one from a zoo that resides in a rain-forest in the northern part of the island, and the second in a spa where you can get your feet cleaned by fish

Another conference I have participated in was DEBS 2010 in Cambridge, UK.

 This year I have also started the work on a new project that deals with proactive computing, and will write more about in in 2011.    

Overall --  interesting year,  the leaves a lot of unfinished challenges for the future.  

DEBS 2010 - the rest of the conference

Cambridge is also a nice place to walk in besides the King's college, most days I found time to take walks around Cambridge, and in one of them crossed the Cam river. It is recommended to visit Cambridge, even if you don't visit the university.

DEBS last day and a half included talks of both the research and industry tracks on various topics. From our team - Ella Rabinovich has delivered two talks: one in the industry track summarizing the experience of Amit over the years (I have written some background for this paper recently), and the other in the research track on analyzing the behavior of event processing applications. We got a lot of interest and have follow-ups in possible research collaborations, I'll write in details about the behavior analysis work in the future.

In addition -- more keynote talks, and also a follow-up meeting to the Dagstuhl seminar.

Got back home -- travelling through London, and had some time to take a walk in Hyde Park.

DEBS 2010 has ended, it was great to meet many friends again, and now it is the time to start working on DEBS 2011.

DEBS 2010 -- first day of the main conference

The first day of the main conference yesterday ended in an organ recital in the King's College Chapel, seen in the picture, magic place - people keep talking about being in Hogwarts. The conference itself started with the first keynote by Mike Franklin who shared his experience both from his work in Berkeley and in his start-up Truviso. Mike's main motivation is to extend database technology to react in a continuous way in addition to the traditional batch way of analytics, and view batch as a special case of the continuous. The talk was a kind of "lite sell pitch", but had some good points, like the observation that a start-up can take a known technology and try to use it for new types of applications (which is what Turviso does), or devise a new technology and tries to attack existing applications better, but it is very difficult to do both at the same time (new technology and new applications). I think that the event processing area indeed tries to do both.

There were some other talks, mostly by graduate students. One of the interesting observations (not a new observation to me), that there is a lot of energy in this community to re-invent wheels, in different variations. I think that one of the good results in the database community of the relational model was that a large part of the research community took it as a basis and constructed the research on top of it, and people did not try to re-invent databases from scratch for every thesis. In event processing we are still not there, and IMHO the area will have more substantial results, if the research efforts will be more focused on advancing the state-of-the-art instead of re-inventing most and advancing a little bit (in the best case). Today we'll have follow-up meeting to the Dagstuhl seminar, and the research grand challenge we are discussing is aimed to that matter.

In the late afternoon there were a fast abstract session, where I gave a short (8 minutes, 4 slides) talk on the interactions between business rules and event processing (I'll write about this subject some other time), and then a session of demos and posters, with a couple of follow-ups for me.

More -later. The second day of the main conference is about to start.

DEBS 2010 --- tutorial days and our context related tutorial

This is King's College in Cambridge, a palace shaped building in which I am staying now, and in which the DEBS 2010 conference is being held. This nice picture was taken by Jacklyn Banergee and can be found is a website called Victorian Web. Cambridge is a very nice place and I took some time both yesterday evening and this evening to walk around. There was one thing in DEBS 2010 that reminded of DEBS 2008 in Rome -- it is July, the weather is quite hot, and this place is not very strong on air-conditioning (there is none in the guest rooms!)-- it seems that it is not an important part in the European culture.

The first day of the DEBS conference was yesterday - a PhD workshop, I have attended part of it, today was the tutorial day, I have attended two tutorials - the one about wireless sensor networks (the first half) and the second about event processing reference architectures - you can view the tutorial page of the DEBS 2010 conference for more details. We also had a tutorial that was delivered by Ella Rabinovich and myself on context related stuff. I have written about contexts several times in this Blog, and the tutorial provides some details about the roles of tutorial, in-depth look about tutorials, and implementation of tutorials in practice. I've uploaded the tutorial on slideshare, and you can view it from there, I hope that the rest of the tutorials will follow soon. Tomorrow - the paper presentation part is starting.

The decision model - Larry Goldberg's talk

A few months ago I have written a review about "THE DECISION MODEL" book. Today I have hosted in the Haifa Research Lab one of the authors, Larry Goldberg, who gave us a live talk about the model. The decision model provides table oriented representation of rules, where a table designates a family of rules which share the same consequence (i.e. the "right hand side" assigns value to the same fact), tables are connected in a way that a fact that is an outcome of one table is an input for another table, this brings some order to rules, and also fits both inference rules or computational rules. I see strong benefit of using such structured way, and also possible to build an hybrid flow of "rule families" and "event processing networks". I think that there is a future there. I was involved in the past in some similar effort to provide some structure to data-driven rules, a short ACM SIGMOD RECORD paper is referenced here.

I'll have a short presentation in DEBS 2010 around the relations between event processing and business rules (in the fast abstract session).

DEBS 2010 program has been published

The program of DEBS 2010 is now published on the conference's website. Note that IBM has become a research power, based on its representation in DEBS.

In total IBMers have authored or co-authored 10 papers out of the 21 papers in the research and industry tracks, and 2 out of the 6 tutorials.

Some details:

Tutorials:

Ella Rabinovich and myself will deliver a tutorial prepared by several members of our team, on: context Aware Computing and its Utilization in Event-Based System

This is the third year in a raw that I am giving (alone or with others) a tutorial in DEBS.

Guy Sharon, another member of our team, participated in the preparation of a tutorial on Measuring Business Value of CEP-Applications.

Papers:

I am a co-author of the paper: Analyzing the Behavior of Event Processing Applications.

Another paper by members of our team is: Industry Experience with the IBM Active Middleware Technology (AMiT) Complex Event Processing Engine (I have not participated in writing this one), both of these papers are planned to be presented by Ella Rabinovich.

Three additional papers are co-authored by other persons in IBM Haifa Research Lab:

Magnet: Practical Subscription Clustering for Internet-Scale Publish/Subscribe

Quilt: A Patchwork of Multicast Regions

On Trade-offs in Event Delivery Systems

Four papers are authored by IBM Watson Research center's guys:

Evaluation of Streaming Aggregation on Parallel Hardware Architectures

Placement of Replicated Tasks for Distributed Stream Processing Systems

Experiences with Codifying Event Processing Function Patterns

Workload Characterization for Operator-Based Distributed Stream Processing Applications

And another paper co-authored by Udo Pletat from IBM Boeblingen

Distributed Heterogeneous Event Processing

This is an indication for the importance that IBM sees for investing in research and thought leadership in the areas of event processing, stream analytics, and pub/sub. More about DEBS -- in July; meanwhile another business trip to Europe is waiting for me in Sunday.

On DEBS 2010 tutorials day

My role in the organization of DEBS 2010 was to handle the tutorials day. Starting in DEBS 2008 in Rome, the tutorials day became (for me) the most interesting day of the conference. Today the tutorial webpage is up and running (this is a first version, some missing details will be added soon). Some of the tutorials have been submitted in push mode by their authors, and some have been solicited in pull mode by me.

Six tutorials are planned: three tutorials in parallel in the morning, and three tutorials in parallel in the afternoon.

There will be two tutorials provided by EPTS work-groups, this time:

• A tutorial about event processing architectures given by Adrian Paschke and Paul Vincent who lead this group
• A tutorial by the new work group that deals with the value of event processing to customers, this tutorial will be given by a collection of people. The workgroup leaders are Rainer von Ammon, Guy Sharon and Nenad Stojanovic.

The additional four tutorials - two of them can be thought as extensions to the event processing languages tutorial that Adrian Paschke, Jon Riecke and myself have presented in DEBS 2009 (and was viewed or downloaded by 3551 persons, last time I checked):

• A tutorial about SQL-based event processing, given by Bernhard Seeger.
• A tutorial about Logic based representation and reasoning of event recognition, given by Alexander Artikis et al.

The additional two planned tutorials are:

• A tutorial about event processing in wireless sensor networks that was delayed from last year since the presenter Antonio Lureiro had to cancel last minute
• A tutorial that was prepared with the help of our team here in IBM Haifa Research Lab that will deal with context aware computing and its utilization in event-based systems. The tutorial will be given by Ella Rabinovich (who will be very active in the conference as she will present two papers in additional to the tutorial) and myself. Additional of our team members that helped in preparing the material are: Yonit Magid, Inna Skarbovsky and Nir Zolotorevsky. I'll write more about this specific tutorial closer to the DEBS conference.

The DEBS research and industry tracks program chairs have also sent notifications about rejection and acceptance this week. I think that there are 21 papers accepted (16 in the research track and 5 in the industry track), the research track acceptance rate was 25%.

Our lab is very active in this conference (various people on various aspects), among the 21 papers there will be 5 papers that with all or some authors from IBM HRL, and it will also have co-authors on 2 of the 6 tutorials mentioned above. This is an indication to the focus that the event-based systems receive in the lab.

Reminder: DEBS 2010 and tutorials

The deadline submission for DEBS 2010 is approaching, tomorrow the abstracts for the industry and research tracks should be submitted. My role in this year's DEBS organization is to serve as tutorial chair. Thus, I am using this opportunity to solicit proposals for tutorials. The tutorial program in DEBS started in 2008 and continued in 2009, in both cases there was a tutorial day preceding the main conference, whose content you can find using the links above. The idea of a tutorial is to provide in-depth survey of teaching a topic that is of interest to the conference's audience. Tutorials can be 1.5 hours or 3 hours long. More details can be found in the call for tutorials. Tutorial submission type is next week, anybody who can contribute a good tutorial is encouraged to send. Last year I have participated in giving a tutorial about event processing languages, we have put the slides on slideshare, checking today it had so far 2861 downloads, so it also may have high visibility.

DEBS 2010 site is up

The DEBS 2010 conference site is up now. DEBS is ACM conference, and the major research conference in the event processing area. DEBS 2010 is done in cooperation with EPTS, and will take place in Cambridge, UK. I am in the organizing committee again, this time in the role of tutorial chair, so I'll be soliciting tutorial submissions. The call for papers both in the research track and the industry track, tutorials, demos and more is on the conference's site.

More on DEBS 2009

I am still in the DEBS conference venue, in a time gap between the conference sessions and the conference dinner that will be held here in an hour or so. This is the time to provide some more comments about DEBS 2009. The conference will continue tomorrow, but I'll skip the last day, going to NY for some IBM meetings. Spending whole three days in a conference is a heavy toll on my busy schedule, but it is fun. The next conference will be held in Cambridge, UK, and the call for papers (above) has been distributed. Today Alex Buchmann gave the second keynote address about some event processing applications and research challenges, I hope that Alex will make his slides available to the public. Also today there have been sessions of demos and posters, mostly by Ph.D. students, mostly concentrate on the transport area, pub/sub, messaging etc... We need more Ph.D. students on the event processing topics. Next there has been a fast abstract session that present work in progress in 10 minutes. I have presented a work in progress on spatial aspects of event processing, and will write more in the future about this activity.


Back to yesterday, the industry track was divided into two parts: industrial reports and a panel. In the industrial reports there was one, presented by Florian Springer, that the audience will remember for long time, not so much because the content of the talk, but since Florian made a point about importance of standards, by showing real-life examples for standards, and the example he chose was condoms, which, according to Florian, have a standard - they are all in the same size. People kept talking about it.

I have moderated the panel about academia/industry relations in event processing, and posed the following questions (see slide below)



The first question was, whether the academia should work on incremental stuff related to current technology, or on disruptive technologies, making current technologies obsolete, which was translated to the question --- do we want to clone John Bates to develop new technologies that will make the technology created by the original John Bates as obsolete. John Bates, who was in the audience, reacted by saying that his wife will not like the idea of cloning him, since she thinks that one of this type is more than enough. The panelists were two persons from academia, and two from industry. One of the industrial people was Richard Tibbetts, Streambase CTO, who showed the famous Gartner hype-cycle picture, claiming that the event processing area is already approaching the plateau. I think that he is a bit optimistic, in my opinion, we are not even at the peak of inflated expectations...

There was also some discussion about teaching event processing courses, and the fact that today it takes a lot of time to get a university graduate being effective in developing event processing applications, since they need to be taught to think in a different way. There have been some more talks, but I am tired from writing, so that's all for now.... Tomorrow early morning -- flying to NYC.