One of the amazing achievements of IBM Research is the recent triumph of the "Watson" program, whose avatar is seen above in the Jeopardy! game, beating two human champions. This raises back the question whether computer thinks, and whether we are getting closer to the "singularity" vision between human and machine intelligence. While this game is a question answering one, a complete machine intelligence will also require the ability to detect events and contexts, and react within a changing environment. I suggested (as a joke) that the next game that a humanoid robot should strive to is the "survivor", which requires other capabilities, like social capabilities, but I think that this challenge is somewhat beyond even the current wildest dreams.
Have not written for the last week, spent some of it in the IBM La Gaude site, near Nice, in South France, the La Gaude site is on mountain and can be seen in a bird eye's view here. The meeting was an internal meeting of "technical leaders" (whatever it is) in IBM South and West Europe, and was kind of educational and networking session. Back home - occupied by some family matters, so now I found some time to catch up. First looking at the Blogland, one can find two old bloggers returning after long silence, one of them is Brian Connell, who returned to blogging after a long time, the other is Marco from Rulecore, who also returned to blogging after a long silence. In a comment to my Blog, the Rulecore guys are wondering why Rulecore is not mentioned in the ACM Computing Survey upcoming survey on event processing while other are mentioned. I think that the reason is quite obvious, while I am familiar with Rulecore (they participated in the implementation of the EPIA example; my students used them in project several times), if one wants to be known by the academic community, then one has to participate in the research oriented conferences, publish (at least industrial) papers etc --- in our world, visibility is the name of the game, so you might consider sending an industrial paper or experience report to DEBS 2011, or participate in the DEBS 2011 challenge.
Another blog (Jason Irwin's) that I don't typically follow provides a new review of the EPIA book.
My next trip is planned for late March in the USA, I was invited to give a tutorial on event processing as one of the highlights of the OMG Technical Conference, I might also do some other meetings in the USA (customers' meeting, IBM meetings, university visits), but still working on the plan.
Paul Vincent has recently blogged about event driven applications within the applications types cited by the Wired magazine in an article talking about further AI applications. There are other work within the AI community which look at the short and long term impact of AI research on the universe, such as the AAAI presidential panel on AI research. There is a lot of potential in collaboration between the AI and EP communities, from the EP side, there are variety of AI techniques that can be used, and from the AI perspective it provides cases in which AI techniques can be specialized in order to be used in practice.
Recently my colleague Yagil Engel , an AI person we recruited to investigate applications of AI techniques for EP, and myself have been notified that our tutorial proposal for AAAI 2011, a top AI conference, was accepted.
So according to the plan we'll be talking four hours in August about the relationships between EP and AI, the first two hours are planned to provide a crash course on event processing for the AI audience, while the second half is planned to discuss various EP challenges that relate to various AI areas (planning, learning, uncertainty handling, autonomous systems and more. The idea is to establish a dialog with more people in the AI community and pursue this line of research further. The down side: we actually need to prepare now a four hours tutorial. Will write more about it when it is finished (I am sharing all my public presentations on slideshare).
The submission time for the EPTS awards that were announced last year are getting closer.
The awards (in cooperation with the OMG event processing community of practice) will be given in two categories: Innovative application awards and Innovative principles award
These awards will be given for innovative applications or research ideas in event processing. This is an opportunity to get recognition for innovative work. The submission instructions can be found in the two links above. The competition is open to all (one does not have to be EPTS member to apply), and to both industry and academic people, as well as those work for software vendors in the event processing area.
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!
Today, the DEBS 2011 challenge has been published.
This is one of the new tracks of DEBS that will hopefully start a tradition within DEBS conferences.
The idea exists in other conferences, and is new to this community, in essence the challenge is a specification of an event processing application with some implementation challenges, along with evaluation criteria.
The track chair for the challenge track is Nenad Stojanovic, and the criteria set for this year are usability criteria:
correctness and simplicity of constructing the application. These are softer criteria relative to performance comparision, but are timely.
The challenge is open to all: commercial products, open source products, research prototypes, home grown event processing systems; submissions can be done in the competitive and non-competitive tracks. Those in the competitive track may win awards, but the non competitive implementers will also gain an opportunity to showcase their solution. I hope that the community will be responsive to the challenge, and this will serve as a showcase to show the different approaches side by side. More on new DEBS 2011 tracks - later.
Mark your calanders -- EPTS will hold its next (sixth) event processing symposium as a virtual symposium.
The idea of the virtual symposium is that a large audience will be able to participate through webcast, the symposium will also be recorded, so you'll be able to view the symposium or any part of it,
The symposium will be co-located with the OMG Technical Meeting in Arlington, VA, USA, some of the speakers will be there in persons and the others will participate from remote.
The agenda was published on the EPTS site.
The symposium will consist of three general themes:
- Follow-up to the Dagstuhl seminar. The concluding document ("event processing manifesto") in its final version will be published around the end of February, and the different teams will present their conclusions.
- Discussion of event processing related standards: this has been one of the manifesto chapters and there will also be presentation of Jim Odell about ideas within OMG around standards.
- Report on several EPTS working groups activities
The EPTS business meeting and awards will be held in conjunction with DEBS 2011 in July.
