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!

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. 

DEBS 2014 tentative program was published

DEBS 2014 will take place in Mumbai, India at the last week of May.   

The tentative program of the conference was published recently on the conference's website. 

My tutorial on the "Internet of Everything" will be delivered on Monday, May 26th, between 10am - 1pm.

Hope to meet old and new friends there (I'll probably arrive couple of days earlier to tour around).    

On DEBS 2013 grand challenge

The DEBS challenge was introduced first time in DEBS 2011, since then it also became "grand". 

This year it was around football (or soccer for the USA guys) and consisted mainly on aggregations, but also detection of proximity between player and ball, using sensors.   There was a lot of interest this year, and 14 submissions.  It becomes a "community building" theme.    6 solutions arrived to the final and were invited to present at the conference, a lot of effort has been dedicated, and we saw very nice and creative solutions.  The main criteria was performance that had to be measured on a given data-set.    In the business meeting I raised some ideas to make it even more interesting, by given "unseen" data at the conference itself, and introduce last minute change in the specification.     The conference is now at its last session.  Next year - DEBS 2014 is planned to be in IIT Bombay, India.