More on Almaden and San Francisco

Packing to start the long journey home;   meanwhile some more trivia and pictures of notable places.

I have taken one of the days to visit the IBM Almaden Research Center, in San Jose.  This is an impressive place, as seen in the picture it resides in a middle of a nature reserve, on top of a mountain.  I have visited IBM sites in various countries -- Israel, USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, China (hope did not forget anybody),  and Almaden is by far the nicest one, has a very relaxed atmosphere,  and also responsible for some of the breakthroughs of IBM research.    A possible collaboration may lead to more visits- the minus side, it is far away, and 10 hours time difference for a conference calls.

In San Francisco itself,   there are many interesting places,  I have driven (not for the first time) through the famous part of Lombard Street which looks like this:

There was a long queue to enter this part of the road, which required stop and go in a steep hill climbing up, but it was worth the experience.     I also drove on the Golden Bridge and stopped there to find out that it is much colder and foggier than down on earth.    In Pier 39 I found the store for left handed 

known as "Lefty's".   One can purchase clocks that move anti-clockwise and a lot of stuff that can help to improve the life of left-handed people (like can opener,  I gave up on the ability to use can openers many years ago!).   I actually never understood why anti-clockwise clocks are relevant to left handed people, but discovered this time looking at some books that left-handed people always draw circles anti-clockwise (true for me).    I purchased a book for lefties as a present to my daughter Hadas, the only of my daughter which inherited this noble property from me.  I'll write more about lefties after digesting this book, but it is now packed. 

Last trivia item --  in the past I thought that Chinese restaurants are dominants in SF, they surely are present, but it seems that the dominant ones are Japanese.  I ate a lot of Sushi this week (I am a Sushi fan anyway -- the only form in which I eat fish).

Driving up and down the hills  is fun, but fun is over --- driving to the airport soon.

More on Event Pattern Detection and Discovery

One cannot ignore these days the change of president in the USA, something with affects the entire universe. One minority the Mr. Obama belongs to is the minority of left-handed people, as can be clearly seen in the picture, while four of the last USA presidents were left handed (which make his fifth in the last seven presidents), conference rooms in the USA or university classes - all of them have desks only for the right handed majority. Here is a picture of a left handed desk,
I am sure that the USA president has much more urgent items on his agenda, however, unlike his predecessors he may also do something for the deprived minority of left-handed people. BTW - the situation in Israel (whose current prime-minister is, surprise...a left-handed person) is somewhat better. We, Left handed people may be a small minority (around 10% of the population) but our collective impact on humanity is unproportionately huge -- starting from Alexander the great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain, Escher, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and many more....well enough of that for now.

Going back to one of my previous posts
that has explained the difference between event pattern detection and event pattern discovery.
In the wake of some questions, here is more about the relationship between these two terms:

• Event pattern detection is performed for patterns that are known in advance, the pattern detection in done "on-line" when the event occur.
• Event pattern discovery is performed typically off-line, it can use machine learning techniques on past events in some cases, it can also use some natural language understanding technique to derive pattern from legal documents (e.g. regulations) in other cases.
  
• A pattern discovery creates patterns that are detected on-line by pattern detection, so they are complementary techniques.
• In some cases there is continuous discovery, and thus the patterns are updated in a dynamic way, however, still the discovery feeds the detection part on-line, and the respective roles are preserved.
• Last but not least, the discovery process may use simulation techniques that use detection of simulated events in order to check assumptions about patterns.
  

Typically, event processing products contain event pattern detection capabilities, in one form or another. The event pattern discovery is considered as add-on, typically using techniques that are not particular to event processing.