Who do you work for?

I came across an interesting posting by Matthias Kaiserwerth, the director of the IBM Zurich Research Lab, entitled "who do you work for?".      In this posting Matthias raises the dilemma, that it is much easier to identify with a smaller organization, sometimes until the level of a single project or department, rather than to identify with a big corporate, or any division of it.     


I certainly agree,  in the past, the department I managed had a logo, and I found that people identified much easier with this department, relative to the lab, division, or IBM.    While this had a great contribution to the people's  motivation and "unit pride", it was not popular in the environment (which I never thought it is a strong consideration).    Creating excellence requires to have identification with a goal, it is much easier to identified with goals that one feels partner in, and not of some abstract entities.  

Some subjective reminiscences on Amit

Catching up on Emails and community's Blog after returning home, I have discovered that Paul Vincent has added Amit to the genealogy of products that he is maintaining. There is also going to be in DEBS 2010 a paper presented about experience with Amit, written by some of our team members (I did not participate directly in this paper, since it described work on some use cases that were done in the period that I have spent outside Haifa Research Lab).

I wanted, for a long time, to write something about Amit, maybe this is the right opportunity.

What is Amit?

Amit has been a name of a research project resulted with what is called today "event processing engine". It is based on ECA rules (however, had originally been specified as extension to SQL, as done in active databases). The original specification and design have been done by Asaf Adi (who also single-handedly coded the first version) and myself in 1998. The original language has survived with some additions over the years.

What is was used for?

Amit was used as a component in some of IBM products over the years, most notably Websphere Message Broker, but also Websphere Sensor Events and some others; also it served for some customers engagements as stand-alone, both IBM internal and external customers. The applications developed through Amit spanned various industries. It was also OEM-ed to two external software vendors and served as part of their solutions.

Where is the name Amit coming from?

The official name has been - "Active Middleware Technology" and at some point, somebody in UK decided that the acronym should be written as AMiT, thus you can see that in some places it is spelled that way, however, the acronym came later -- the original name was indeed Amit, and it was called this name since Amit is an Hebrew name, and I chose Hebrew names to all my research projects (Pardes, Adi and Arad are some of the other names), this particular one is also an Indian name, and one person whose name is Amit, who was born in India told me that the meaning of the name in Hindu is "to aspire beyond limitations", actually looking Amit at Wikipedia, one can found that the Hindu meaning of the name is: Infinite or immeasurable or boundless. I liked the aspiring beyond limitations, since that when we started it we did not know where it will lead, but we had a feeling that this is something big, a feeling that the immediate environment did not share (hence the limitations). Later, I have coined the "Active Middleware Technology" acronym, and the plan has been to develop a middleware with many components, we started with a first component called: situation manager, and somehow this was the only component developed, as we went deeper in this one, thus the situation manager component became a synonym of Amit. Again -- history develops in strange way.

What is the impact and legacy of Amit?

With the acquisition of Aptsoft, in early 2008, the IBM executives decided to retire Amit, and it is now still used as a legacy in some places, but not been developed for several years now. However, the impact of Amit has been and still is noticeable. IBM has recognized the impact last year through its internal awards process, that the activity around Amit, and some other related activities was the direct reason that IBM has decided to enter the EP market.

Looking at technical impact -- since we have published detailed description of Amit in journal and conferences papers, it was read by many people in the community, and we identified ideas in various products (even names of operators) inspired to Amit, I'll not finger any specific product, though. I think that some of the ideas that we worked on (which have been developed further in the post-Amit period) like contexts and policies laid foundations for the next generation.

As the paper written about experience with Amit states -- the experience with Amit also taught us where the event processing platforms should evolve to, and triggered the post-Amit work on the EPN/EPA based event processing that we are working on in the last couple of years.

This is a very brief account on Amit, I might write some follow-up to this one telling more.

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.