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 the PLAY project

I have spent this week some time in cold Brussels, in my role of reviewer of the PLAY project, which was a project in the framework of the ICT program of the European Union.    There are quite a few projects that have event processing at their core, in fact early in 2014 we'll be involved in two new projects: SPEED and FERARI, about which I'll write in a later phase.  Being a reviewer, I accompanied the PLAY project since its beginning -- starting with the "kick-off" review, and continuing to the three annual reviews.  As a reviewer, my role is both to evaluate what was done and provide comments and evaluations, and also to be a kind of mentor for the project and try to help them going in the right direction.    The project has evolved during these years, started with event-driven services as a motivation, and in addition touched topics like Internet of Things and events coming from sensors.   It uses RDF and semantic web technology to describe events and patterns, and also plays with the idea of event marketplace, an idea that deserves more discussion in one of the next posts. As for the event processing part, they have developed distributed ETALIS,   I guess that this will be replaced if they want to take it to the real life, as logic programming based languages are great for the few people who understand how to program with them, and a barrier to others.  While this is a research project, and in real-life setting  this implementation will probably be replaced, the approach taken have a promise.  There will also be some follow-ups to this project, which is something that is desirable for these projects, the "after life".   On the whole, this is an opportunity both to assist and to learn, and I hope to hear about the "after life" in the future.  

Reviewing project for the European Commission

Dortmund, Germany.     Morning -- packing to start the way home.
In the last couple of days I have participated as a reviewer in two reviews of  EU projects which are centered around event processing -- Play (in Brussels) and Pronto (here in the fire fighters instruction center).   Play is in his first year,  building infrastructure for  "events marketplace",  Pronto in its third (and last) year, deals with events that arrive from multi-media sources, you can read some details about them on their websites.   Getting more event processing centered projects funded by government agencies is an indication of the growing importance of this area.    Got some interesting observations out of these reviews, which I'll write about later.

The EU FET Flagship program

Back at home. In the previous two days I have attended an EU conference in Brussels on FET (Future Emerging Technologies) Flagship. The EU is recently acting to diversify its R&D investments, and launch some new programs in addition to the traditional programs that will keep running. One of this new ways is PPP (Public/Private Partnership) that is aimed at short term more engineering oriented projects, while the FET flagship goes to the opposite direction: launch two very ambitious large 10-years projects, with around 1B Euro investment in each.

They have brought some examples of projects in that scale such as: Large Hardon Collider, The Human Genome project and some others, with varying degrees of success. The rule of the game is that 5-6 ideas will be given a year (and a funding of around 1.5M Euro each) to develop the program (including partnership around the world, funding sources -- the EU will fund only part, expect that national funding agencies will support it as well as others), and out of them 2 will be selected.

In the last couple of days I have heard a lot of talks about potential proposals, many of them will probably merge, others will disappear. The commission people are encouraging people to merge and share, they don't think it is reasonable to have more than 10-15 proposals. One of the important tests for the proposals is the grandmother test: If you can explain your grandmother in one sentence what it does in terms that your grandmother will understand, then you'll be able to sell the idea to politicians. IMHO most of the presentations I have heard fail to satisfy this property, especially all the ones which has technology in their center. The promising directions relate to Biology -- human brain, breakthrough in robotics, and socio-technical systems.

What is the relationship to the "event processing grand challenge"? --- this may be one of the vehicles to advance the grand challenges, however, since the two flagship projects will start in 2013 -- we need to find other avenues to start earlier.

Event processing is relevant to everything, the human brain is very much event-driven, robots are in many cases event-driven, social evolution is event-driven and more.

One of the challenges is to sell the contribution of event processing to these projects, in discussing with one of them, they thought that they indeed need to process events, but there is no research here, just hard dirty work of programing. I told them that our research issue is how to eliminate the hard dirty work of programming in conventional languages and provide for them something much more high-level with "easy clean work" instead. They have not thought of it this way, since we have not reached out to these communities yet, I gave the analogy that 40 years ago everybody has created home-made database, until the relational database changed the picture, this is exactly what we are doing, raising the level of abstraction.

Next --- see where this can fit and how it can intersect with the EP grand challenge, and determine how to position it (in my talk on live ecology I have equated event processing to the nervous system of a human body). My presentation on live ecology is now on slideshare.

More - later.

The event processing grand challenge - live ecology

Still travelling in Europe, I have spent one day in Luxembourg, serving as a reviewer in the Pronto project that deals with "event recognition for resource management", the highlight was showing us a nice demo of a van that was covered with sensors that track noise, density and location of the car, and can provide diagnostics about the comfort of passengers (too dense, too noisy) and the quality of driving (unsafe driving, sharp turns). I also discovered that one can miss train connections and not only flight connections, and arrived to the hotel in Luxembourg very late at night. From Luxembourg I continued in another 3 hours train ride to Brussels, from which I am writing now.

In Brussels I am attending an EU conference about the FET Flagship program. The European Commission is trying to diversify its programs in order to achieve more impact, and invest more in high risk - high impact long term research; there are several big consortia already established, and I will try to see whether the "event processing grand challenge" ideas, can fit into one or more of these, I am planned to deliver a short presentation today on "live ecology", taking the theme of making Asimov, my favorite writer, come to live with some of his amazing ideas, starting from Gaia ("The Foundation Edge"), a galaxy behaving like a single organism, and moving through the fantastic voyage, the blend between human and robot, and predicting the society's course (Psychohistory), and then hopefully return home later tonight.

On the EASSy consortium

Back to regular work (and life -- I am trying now to contact the electrician to do some repairs in the house) after submitting the EASSy proposal for the EU project, waiting for evaluation and decisions (cometition is very tough).

Some more details about the EASSy consortium. EASSy is an acornym of: Event-based Adaptiveness of Service-based Systems. It consists of 16 partners, some of them are big commerical vendors (IBM, SAP, Software AG, Nokia Siemens Network, Siemens), some are system integrators (Thales, TXT, CITT, Corrvino), some academic/research institutes (FZI Karlsruhe, University of Trento, Aston University, National Technical University of Athens), and some public organization (Maccabi Helatchare and City of Genoa). The proposal itself is a very detailed document explaining the project approach, plan, management aspects, and planed impact. If this project is realized, I believe it will be of interest to the event processing community. Here is the proposal's abstract that explaines the idea:

The future Internet will play a major role as a medium for connecting service providers— with consumers in the supply chain (business-to-business connection), or with customers such as patients and healthcare organizations (business-to-consumer connection); thereby leading to the concept of the "Internet of Services".

Within service provision, the velocity of changing situations while maintaining the ability to adapt properly and proactively is becoming a notable factor in the ability to maintain business competitiveness, and can determine the survival of small and medium enterprises. The need to adapt arises in all areas. Examples include proactively adapting the treatment protocol for patients ("smart healthcare"), initiating changes to car-fleet delivery assignment based on travel conditions ("smart transportation"), adapting the working procedures of an emergency team in extreme conditions such as flooding ("smart emergency management"), and adjusting the plan and distribution of work between different parts of the supply chain when partial power failures occur in a specific region ("smart supply chain management").

During the past couple of years, Event-Processing Platforms have emerged as the fastest growing segment of application integration middleware (according to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC analysts). Many event producers are connected to the Internet (the "Internet of Things" phenomenon), and many business processes are instrumented to provide events from the service execution, so the combination of event processing and Internet services provides a tremendous opportunity to achieve the adaptivity described above.

The proposed EASSy project will take advantage of this opportunity and generate a solid framework that will revolutionize the capability of future Internet services to be adaptive. This framework will seamlessly provide both event processing capabilities and service adaptation capabilities. The event processing capabilities will determine when adaptation is needed, and the service adaptation capabilities will deal with the question of what adaptation should be performed, either autonomously or requiring human interaction; furthermore, the system should be accessible to business developers who do not possess programming skills.

Achieving this ambitious goal requires the project team to push the envelope beyond the current state-of-the-art and best practices, and will strive to contribute to the commercial world as well as to science in various areas, such as modelling, event processing, adaptation schemes, human-computer interaction, security, privacy, quality of service, and accountability. In addition, there are ambitious engineering challenges: to make the system function effectively and efficiently, be able to work on top of legacy systems, and deal with a variety of different types of event sources.

The EASSy consortium has built a well qualified inter-disciplinary team, which includes several world-class experts in the key research areas, as well as a strong engineering team, a test validation plan using strategic use cases, and a well established exploitation plan covering various software sectors and industry domains.

On our proposed EU project - Take I

CDG Airport, Paris.

This is, more or less, how the A3 road in Paris has looked like today when I was on my way to CDG airport, when I asked the taxi driver how long it will take to the airport he said - no more than 40 minutes, well it took 2 hours, and could have taken more, unless at some point he lost his patient, drove through the next exit, and navigated with his GPS through some small streets
to get to the airport from a different direction. Since the price of the taxi is a function not only of distance but of time also, then the price also exceeded (by far) his estimate... This was not the only traffic related event. My airline sent me SMS to notify me that my flight home has been cancelled and they re-booked me on the next flight 2 hours later (that's why I was not pressed of the long trip to the airport). They sent me the SMS in French, while I was sitting in a train, and the passenger sitting opposite to me was kind enough to translate me, 5 minutes later they re-sent me the same SMS, this time in Hebrew.

I ended the day in visiting ILOG, acquired by IBM, and before that in the morning, together with some of our partners, we had a meeting with the EU commission in Brussels, about a proposed EU project. This is planned to be a relatively big project that will look at the future web services infrastructure which will be event-driven, and include event-enabled BPM. . We got good and useful feedback, and have a lot of action items, like finalizing the consortium. I'll write more about it in the next few months.