Titles and abstracts of the four keynote speakers in DEBS 2011 are now available, they will be updated on the DEBS website a little bit later, after the DEBS webmaster returns from vacation. All of them seem to be interesting talks.
Speaker: Chris Bird.
Chris is the solution architect for travel and leisure at Progress Software, until recently he has been the Chief Architect of Sabre Airline Solution.
Title: Avoiding he said/she said arguments in distributed event handling systems
Abstract: Processing critical event stream models, whether they be in chemical plants, in power stations, in process environments, in aircraft operations all have one thing in common. You want to know that the information got to where it was supposed to go, and you want to know that proper action was taken. Innocent sounding phrases, but with surprising complexity. Expand that thinking to conceptual business events and the complexity multiplies. In process control environments, for example, the payloads are typically small (10s to 100s of bytes), often in the form “Device id, Timestamp, Value1[,Valuen], so transmitting that data over a network, e.g. SCADA can be quite network efficient.However Business Events tend to be less frequent and will often have significant associated data destined for several “downstream” handlers. Taking an example from the airline industry, the event of rescheduling a flight has significant repercussions in Passenger Bookings, Airport Slot Management, Revenue Management, Equipment Scheduling, Catering, Fuel Fleet Scheduling, Crew Scheduling, together with knock on effects to other parts of the airline’s schedule as equipment is anticipated not to be available when planned. Add to that the extra complexity of having many other “businesses” involved. A late incoming flight may have effects on car rentals, hotel reservations, dinner reservations, etc. So the single event (a reschedule) has enormous ramifications. Along with these business ramifications, there are also legal ramifications. When a charge is to be disputed, (e.g. a hotel charging the first night fee because of a traveler no show) it is extremely important to know whether the hotel was notified prior to the cutoff time. The session introduces the ideas behind decoupling and situational awareness, so that efficient event handling takes place, together with appropriate situational awareness to enable policy decisions to be enacted.
Speaker: Don Ferguson
Don is Chief Technology Officer of CA.
Abstract: IT system and application management is critical to business use of IT systems. Distributed event processing is core to application and systems management, even for applications that are not "event driven." Emerging technology like virtualization and cloud computing significantly increase the central role of distributed event processing. IT systems and applications management introduces major challenges and requirements not typically seen in application centric event processing. This presentation provides an overview of IT system and application management use of distributed event processing, and the evolution for cloud computing. The presentation then provides an overview
of current solutions and technology to the requirements. Finally, there will be a discussion of open issues and research challenges.
Speaker: Johannes Gehrke
Johannes is a professor of computer science in Cornell University.
Title: Declarative Data-Driven Coordination
Abstract: There are many applications that require users to coordinate and communicate. Friends want to coordinate travel plans, students want to jointly enroll in the same set of courses,
and busy professionals want to coordinate their schedules. These tasks are difficult to program using existing abstractions provided by database systems because in addition to the traditional ACID properties provided by the system they all require some type of coordination between users. This
is fundamentally incompatible with isolation in the classical ACID properties of transactions.
In this talk, I will argue that it is time for the database and event processing communities to look beyond isolation towards principled and elegant abstractions that allow for communication and coordination between some notion of (suitably generalized) transactions. This new area of declarative data-driven coordination (D3C) is motivated by many novel applications and is full of challenging research problems. I will start by surveying existing abstractions in database systems and explain why they are insufficient for D3C. I will then describe entangled queries, a coordination language that extends SQL by constraints that allow for the coordinated choice of result tuples across queries originating from different users or applications, and I will discuss algorithms for evaluating entangled queries. I will conclude with a set of research challenges for event processing in this new area.
Speaker: Calton Pu
Calton is Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software in the College of Computing,
Georgia Institute of Technology.
Title: A World of Opportunities: CPS, IOT, and Beyond
Abstract: The continuous evolution of computing and networking technologies (e.g., Moore’s Law) is creating a new world populated by many sensors on physical and social environments. This emerging new world goes much further than the original visions of ubiquitous computing and World Wide Web. Aspects of this new world have received various names such as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IOT). CPS links many physical sensor data to detailed simulation models running on large data centers. IOT brings together many appliances, making much more environmental data available and supporting control of these appliances. CPS/IOT applications are many, including personalized healthcare, intelligent transportation, smart grid, sustainable environment, and disaster recovery as representative examples. These CPS/IOT applications are motivated and strongly pushed by significant new social, economic, and human benefits. At the same time, these applications are also mission-critical with serious quality of service requirements such as real-time performance, continuous availability, high security and privacy. We will argue that the traditional process-oriented programming languages and software architectures should be augmented by distributed event-based facilities and abstractions for the construction of large scale distributed CPS/IOT applications. In addition to the focus on performance, we anticipate that other quality of service dimensions such as availability, reliability, security, and privacy will become important concerns in the research on distributed event-based systems. We will discuss research opportunities and challenges that bring the distributed event based systems technology to CPS/IOT applications.
