The MSc exam of Ella Rabinovich

Yesterday I chaired the MSc exam of Ella Rabinovich, who finished her thesis in joint supervision of Avi Gal (who was my PhD student) and myself.  Looking at my own record, Ella is my 21st MSc graduate, in addition to 6 PhD graduates (one person, David Botzer, has done both MSc and PhD theses under my supervision - so the list comes up to 26 people).    I am doing graduate students supervision as a hobby (the Technion does not pay for it),  it enables to investigate idea that are typically one or two steps ahead from what we are doing in the IBM Haifa Research Lab (which by itself has to be some steps ahead of the markets), Ella works also in our Proton team in IBM,  the thesis deals with pattern rewriting as one of the means of performance improvement in event processing run-time,  I have already written about our DEBS'11 paper on this topic.   the thesis was well accepted by the examination team and got a relative high grade.   My guess is that we'll hear more about notable  research contributions of Ella in the future. 

On Hadoop and event processing

The region which I live in did not have much luck recently, first the big fire on the Carmel ridge, that lasted for three and half days until it got under control, and now a major storm, with winds running in velocity of >  100 KM/H  and a lot of rain.   These two pictures, taken from the Israeli news Internet sites, were taken in Haifa yesterday.   The storm is now over and some nicer days are ahead of us.


Back to professional issues -- Alex Alves (who represents Oracle in the EPTS Steering committee among other things) wrote a nice posting in his blog explaining the Hadoop programming model, if you are still not familiar with it, it provides good explanation. 


Hadoop is batch oriented and provides kind of imperative programming model, but can be wrapped and concealed by higher level language.     I am working now with a graduate student who investigates the usability of the map-reduce model for some of the event processing functions (e.g. aggregation).   I am curious  to see the analysis of this work.   More - later