Call for papers: special issue of ACM Transaction on Internet Technology on "event recognition"

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology issued a call for papers for a special issue on "event recognition".  In the CFP they explain that "event recognition" mean "event pattern matching".  This is an opportunity to report on interesting research work in that area, with a relatively short review and publication cycles.

More impressions on the last two days in DEBS 2013

The social event of DEBS 2013 was a guided tour in the Dallas Cowboys stadium, and a dinner in a nearby restaurant.  Here are some subjective highlights from the last couple of days -- I captured some isolated points, not the entire picture:

1. An interesting paper on intra-query parallelism, which in my terminology is the optimization of a single event processing agent, after filtering-in only the relevant events.  This paper came from ETH Zurich.

2. Zohar Feldman - member of our own team gave a talk about "proactive event processing in action", discussing application in the logistic area, as part of the industrial session.

3. Another interesting talk in the industrial session was delivered by Mauricio Arango from Oracle -- on mobile QOS management using EP.   Seems that Oracle is advancing its spatial event processing.

4. The second keynote -- on smart grid platform by David Wollman from NIST,  talked about platforms, standards and challenges

5.  There are two topics I'll write in follow-up posts: the grand challenge session, and a paper about complex actions.  

Recent paper about spatiotemporal event processing

Recently we see more work on spatiotemporal event processing.  I came across a recent paper, authored by

Foued Barnouni and Bernard Moulin from Laval University which deals with spatiotemporal event patterns. 

The generic form of a spatiotemporal pattern is shown in the figure below,  first the temporal relation is evaluated and then the spatial relation, where the spatial patterns can be of three types: distance, topology and direction.  The model also supports qualitative pattern such as "far", "near",  "very near"  enables the definition of fuzzy qualifiers in a pattern.   The paper provides good overview of the spatiotemporal event processing topic, as well as a specific model implemented by a combination of TreeSap, a qualitative reasoning GIS system,  and the event processing part is implemented in Esper. 

DEBS 2012 - our presentation on "basic proactive"

I have written before about the proactive event-driven paradigm that we are investigating in the last couple of years.   Today I have presented some new results in this area, the "basic proactive" model which provides end-to-end solution for a restricted type of applications with several characteristics.  The paper co-authors by Yagil Engel, Zohar Feldman and myself is in the proceedings (will probably be in the ACM digital library soon).   The presentation can be found on slideshare.

Since there has been a slight delay in the schedule, the session chair allowed only 2 questions, one by Alex Buchmann who wondered whether it is wise to introduce new buzzword  like proactive, or position it otherwise.  I think that there are pros and cons, but the buzzword is already there and I'll write about it.

Adrian Paschke, who is interested in the formal aspects, remarked that classical logic will not be sufficient here since conclusions are uncertain and can be retracted.  I answered that we'll probably need non-monotonic logic, maybe combined with some kind of quantitative logic of uncertainty (such as probabilistic logic).  If somebody want to take the challenge and work on the formal model -- let  me know.

More -later. 

First comperhensive survey on event processing

The first  comprehensive survey on event processing  was accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys, the leading avenue of publication for surveys.  the survey was co-authored by GIANPAOLO CUGOLA and ALESSANDRO MARGARA and is available from the Politecenico di Milano webpage,  the paper surveys the area from the days of active databases until current products. The paper view complex event processing, data streams and active databases as kind of information flow processing, and as such information flow contains both events and data, thus the scope of this survey is quite large.  It compares different languages and systems in data model, rule model, time model and language model aspects.   In some cases I would probably use different terminology, but overall it is quite a comprehensive paper (70 pages long!) , and should be an interesting reading to anybody interested in this area.
Enjoy!