On the city data management workshop in CIKM'12

I am one of the co-chairs of the "City Data Management 2012" workshop in CIKM'12 

The work on smart cities have been emerged in the last few years.  The data management aspect of smart cities is one of the major topics, due to the need to acquire significant amount of data, much of it streaming data, and perform monitoring, search, query and various analytics.  The workshop focuses on the several aspects of city data management.    The call for papers is now out,   the interesting part for me is the data monitoring part, which consists of the following points:

• Complex Event Processing for Smarter Cities
• Anomaly detection and prevention
• Forecasting city events
• Event-based optimization for adaptive city operations
• City process monitoring

If you are in this area -- consider submission. Note that the conference will take place in Maui, Hawaii.

On VLDB 2010 and the event processing tutorial

Still in Singapore,  after the vacation, this is VLDB time,  VLDB is one of the largest databases conferences, however databases is a large heterogeneous area, and I wonder if there is a single person who can understand all  talks.   The keynote talk by Divesh Saristava from AT&T Research talked about stream warehouses, or event stores in my language.  There were also some event processing related demos, and a stream research track, with one interesting talk that compared the semantics of Coral8 CCL language to this of Streambase and got to the (not surprising) conclusion that their semantics is different and similar queries would yield different results, then it tried to come up with a framework to generalize the two types of semantics, and they extend it to other languages.   I think that this is in line of the work we are doing on common model, and will follow up with them (they are from ETH Zurich) about collaboration on that one.


Today I have delivered a tutorial under the title "event processing - past, present and future",  much of it follows the EPIA book.    Since this is a database conference I opened in showing various opinions about the relations between event processing and data stream management, which is the name used in the database community, the various opinions are:

1.  They are aliases -- a stream is just a collection of events, likewise, an event is just a member in a stream, and the functionality is the same.
2. Stream management is a subset of event processing -- there are different ways to do event processing, streams is one of them
3. Event processing is a subset of stream management -- event streams is just one type of stream, but there are voice stream, video stream and more streams
4. Event processing and stream management are distinct and there is no overlapping between them.

As I have heard all four opinions about it,  I'll let you judge which is the right one. Hint:  option 4 is totally false, there is some truth in options 1-3, depending on the viewpoint.


Anyway - the tutorial has been uploaded to slideshare, and you can view it there. Enjoy.


Tomorrow is my last planned day in Singapore, and I'll write more about this very impressive country soon.

On VLDB 2010 -- events and streams related papers

After a few years of missing VLDB, I plan this year to participate in the VLDB conference in Singapore (which will be an opportunity to visit Singapore, I have never been there). I have a tutorial accepted entitled: Event Processing - past, present, future. VLDB is one of the major research conferences of the database community (my original home community).

The list of accepted papers is now on the website -- looking at it there are some papers whose title include either events or streams:

Complex Event Detection at Wire Speed with FPGAs

High-Performance Dynamic Pattern Matching over Disordered Streams

Achieving High Output Quality under Limited Resources through Structure-based Spilling in XML Streams

SECRET: A Model for Analysis of the Execution Semantics of Stream Processing Systems

Recognizing Patterns in Streams with Imprecise Timestamps

On Dense Pattern Mining in Graph Streams

Database-support for Continuous Prediction Queries over Streaming Data

Conditioning and Aggregating Uncertain Data Streams: Going Beyond Expectations

From a Stream of Relational Queries to Distributed Stream Processing

iFlow: An Approach for Fast and Reliable Internet-Scale Stream Processing Utilizing Detouring and Replication

And some demos:

Active Complex Event Processing: Applications in RealTime Health Care

Efficient Event Processing through Reconfigurable Hardware for Algorithmic Trading

Geospatial Stream Query Processing using Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight

As you can notice - in the database community the term "streams" is more common than the term "events", and I'll go back to the discussion of streams vs. events soon.

IBM will have a substantial presence in VLDB with 9 research papers, 5 industrial papers, 3 demos and 1 tutorial.

More - later.