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.

DEBS 2013 grand challenge was announced

DEBS 2013 grand challenge was published today.  This is one of the new items we introduced in DEBS 2011 which continues to the next generations. The idea is to publish an event processing application, view various implementation and evaluate based on announced criteria.

This time the application is around football (soccer in American English), where the input events come from sensors attached to players' shoes and hands and to the ball, and some referee events.   The events are spatiotemporal by nature. 

The goal is to calculate various statistics about players performance, ball's location etc.

Criteria -- application's performance (latency,  throughput),  while keeping correctness. 

I hope that various teams will answer this challenge and will provide interesting solutions. 

On DEBS 2011 challenge track

Today, the DEBS 2011 challenge has been published. 
This is one of the new tracks of DEBS that will hopefully start a tradition within DEBS conferences.
The idea exists in other conferences, and is new to this community, in essence the challenge is a specification of an event processing application with some implementation challenges, along with evaluation criteria.


The track chair for the challenge track is Nenad Stojanovic, and the criteria set for this year are usability criteria:
correctness and  simplicity of constructing the application.    These are softer criteria relative to performance comparision, but are timely.  


The challenge is open to all:  commercial products, open source products, research prototypes, home grown event processing systems; submissions can be done in the competitive and non-competitive tracks.  Those in the competitive track may win awards,  but the non competitive implementers will also gain an opportunity to showcase their solution.    I hope that the community will be responsive to the challenge, and this will serve as a showcase to show the different approaches side by side.      More on new DEBS 2011 tracks - later. 

First glance on DEBS 2011

We are doing now the first stages of DEBS 2011, I have taken upon myself the role of general chair (some people never learn...).  DEBS 2011 is going to be hosted by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY.
The team has been established, and you can view it in the conference's website that has been constructed by the conference Web chair, Darko Anicic.    We have started also to work with ACM about the logistics details, hopefully the CFP will be released within a couple of weeks.  

DEBS 2011 will both continue the tradition of DEBS conferences (the 5th as a conference and the 10th if we include the workshops), and will also include several new components that will be advertised soon, in a title level:  we plan a "DEBS challenge" demo session, and  "new ideas gong show" session - more details to follow.
DEBS 2011 will also have a strong collection of keynote speakers.  The four keynote speakers (who already confirmed) are:

Chris Bird - Chief Architect of Sabre airlines, who will provide talk from the point of view of an end user

Dr. Don Ferguson -  CTO of CA, who will provide talk from the point of view of  technology providers

Professor Johannes Gehrke - from Cornell university   and

Professor Calton Pu - from Georgia Tech
both of them  will provide talks from the research point of view.


More details about DEBS 2011 -- later.