The human body as event producer

I realized that I have not written anything in this blog, in the last week, well - there are weeks in which one is in a passive mode, anyway, I am at home, ready  to go to the office (Sunday is a working day in Israel, our weekend is Friday-Saturday), but wait for the technician from the phone company, all our phone lines are dead since Thursday afternoon.   Since each member of the family has cellphone, it is not a big damage, the most notable damage is that the wireless internet at home is linked to the phone (ADSL),  however, we have a second home LAN (wired) which is based on the cable TV, since none of the internet connections are reliable, they also serve as a backup for each other.   The phone company was a government owned company that was privatized, but retained a strong employee union as a legacy, and as such, its service is not that good, so we'll see when the technician will bother to come.


Anyway -- the picture above is of stream of events going out directly from the human brain, it is taken from a recent article in Scientific American.   There is a lot of recent work about brain-computer interface, the brain itself is, of course, an event processor, it receives events through the senses,  makes some decisions, and acting with some actuators.  There are also a lot of events being created in the human body  that has benefit to be processed elsewhere, either due to fact that we want to have "extension" to the brain to help sort out the events and detect situation that the human brain may miss, or that the human body is just one source, and there are other sources for events that this particular human is unaware of.     


I see a lot of future in taking what was done in event processing and utilize it outside enterprise computing, and I'll investigate this theme more in the next few blog postings. 

On The WHEN question - in event processing

In one of the previous postings I have talked about various notions of real-time, from the example of the human event processing that I have given yesterday, it seems that there is importance in some cases to react in "hard real-time", e.g. if we'll assume that instead of human drivers the cars will be driven by a computerized system, then this system will have a lot of hard real-time constraints, especially when related to safety, based on events that received from sensors about the environment. An inheritance from active databases is the distinction between "immidate action" and "deferred action", however these are inaccurate terms-

Immediate typically means:

• As soon as possible based on best effort,

However sometimes it means :

• Hard or soft real time constraints on the latency.

Deferred may mean:

• As soon as possible after the end of some context (e.g. at the end of a time window)

But it may also means:

• Exactly in 5:00PM, Anytime between 7:00 - 9:00 PM etc..

Indeed - not all events are processed immediately, the best example is an absent pattern based on time-out, in which the fact that the event did not happen is processed at the end of the time-out .

In some cases we also want to apply event patterns to historical event - which is known as "retrospective processing"; this will be discussed in another opportunity.

Unplanned events - again

This (more or less) how my MPV car looked like at the beginning of this day, unfortuantely, it does not look like this now -- while driving in a highway, there was some traffic congestion, and the traffic slowed down, however, the driver behind me has not detected this event and proceeded to drive full speed - as a result he crashed his small car into my car, totally destroyed his car, but made also substantial damage to the back of my car. So - I had an absent event, did not make the meeting I was driving to, had to wait for police, and then almost two hours for a replacement car from the leasing company -- so wasted much of the day. Luckily for me, I have detected that with the momentum of the crash, I am approaching very quickly a track before me -- and succeeded to stop the car before getting into the track -- otherwise, I may not be sitting at home and typing now -- so people also need to process events in real-time and not in batch...