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. 

Continuous event processing in Quartet FS

Continuing to survey additional product related to the event processing area, I came across Quartet,   this illustration is taken from Quartet FS' webpage.   Quartet FS advertises its product as "aggregation engine",  from the description it seems to be some incarnation of active database, where the OLAP cube is constantly updated, this variation is useful for some financial services applications.      I guess that we'll discover more event related products coming from different areas within different frameworks (in this case - OLAP/BI).

Proactive thinking as a cultural change

Yesterday I've returned home from my last trip in Europe (last for the next few months I hope, at least no trip is now planned in the horizon).    I spent Thursday in Zurich in a all day meeting with partners in a consortium we have created applying for EU project,  we have reviewed several use cases, and talked with domain experts in several areas who told us that in their domains, proactive solutions simply don't exist.    Reflecting on that I think proactive computing might be enabler for cultural change.   We are very much focused on technology -- what is the architecture, what is missing beyond the state-of-the-practice, what are all the moving parts -- this is of course important -- but let's look at the bigger picture;  the society is governed by policies, regulations, rules...  Likewise, enterprises like to have strict policies to handle each situations, current analytic software serve this culture -- it typically serves those who make the rules, trying to constantly improve the rules by analyzing the past; the result is recommendation to the policy makers to refine the policies.  
Proactive thinking is different,  here the aim is to determine when following the current rules will yield wrong result and change it, if possible, in autonomous way.   If we take a simple example,   in the Zurich meeting we have discussed traffic management systems -- there has been a lot of work in this area,   there are system who sense traffic congestion and alert about it; there are systems which learn traffic patterns according to hours a day, day in the week, and other relevant segments, and make optimization for the traffic-light policies.  In many cases, traffic light policies are determined by persons who make additional considerations (a powerful politician that lives in some street -  entering and exiting this street in certain hours get priority), anyway, people generally want the power to make these decisions, and prefer that the system will behave according to consistent rules.  Proactive thinking in this case is identifying anticipatory traffic congestion and change the traffic light policies accordingly, overriding the regular policies, trying to resolve a specific problem.


This is a cultural change, since the culture typically prefers that the measures will be statistical, and the behavior of systems will be consistent,  this preference has deep cultural roots in certain societies, and reflect the inability of people to get real-time decisions, or improvise.    Those who will adopt proactive thinking may go beyond the cultural handicap and achieve relative benefits....  more about it - later

Darko's PhD defense

On Wednesday I have been in Karlsruhe, Germany,  been on the exam committee of Darko Anicic in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of the elite universities in Germany.   After the defense Darko's colleagues gave him this hat with a lot of pictures and some gadgets glued to it, and he had to guess for each of them what is the meaning and how it is related to him  (because of me, I guess, they have conducted this ceremony in English).    Darko's dissertation was on Etalis, a logic programming based event processing engine, Darko has investigated the implementation of event processing on top of a logic-based knowledge base that contains background knowledge and inference capabilities.  He also took the challenge and implemented the Fast Flower Delivery example from the EPIA book; Etalis is available as open source.  
I think that Darko has done very good work, both in the conceptual level and in proving the concept (he has done measurements that indicated that the performance is roughly equivalent and some times better than existing engines).  I hope that Darko will be able to continue and grow as a researcher. 

The Fear Index

This morning I have finished reading "THE FEAR INDEX" by Robert Harris, who is known for his ancient Rome novels.  This time he has a "science fiction" that happens in the present coupled with a thriller.  It concentrates around hedge fund that uses AI for algorithmic trading,  and succeeds to crash the market and make a  huge earning by trading in short.   It is inspired by the 2010 flash crash.  


As I am a big fan of autonomic computing and  it utilization in daily life and in the business world, I often encounter people who have concerns about computers making decisions, and computers taking over.  Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark wrote the famous plot for the  film of "2001 space odyssey" in which the spaceship computer took over, the computer name was HAL, which is backwardly-removed one letter from IBM.    Some science fiction writers like Asimov also have a vision that computers (in this case android robots) will take over the world, but Asimov considers it as a good property,  since he was not a big fan of the human race.


I am not sure we are close to computers taking over the world, but autonomic systems should be constructed with self-monitoring that can be visible.  This is something that we'll be exploring (among other things) within new proposed project we are doing with many partners.   

On video streams and events

I have not written in this Blog for a while, last week I have been in a business trip in Brussels and Luxembourg, had a few hours to play tourist in Brussels and chose to go to mini-Europe, in the picture we see the France section - in the background the atomium, Brussels' iconic site.  Travelling in the train between Brussels and Luxembourg I had two observations:  the train accumulates delay, so it is better to  take a big slack of time if you rely on trains in Belgium, also it was interesting to see in stations the amount of people getting off to take advantage of the 2-3 minutes of stopping in order to smoke,  the amount of smokers in Europe in general, and in Belgium in particular is probably much higher than those we are used to in Israel (and other countries like USA and Canada).   

Getting back to the events business - I have noticed Rainer's posting in the complexevents forum, about video camera on the bus in Ireland that he experienced, actually there are various cameras on buses for various reasons - example video cameras installed on school buses whose aim according to the site is: 

•    Deter bullying, vandalism, and other offenses
•    Reinforce driver accountability
•    Document chain of events
•    Substantiate or refute claims
•    External stop arm activated video of passing motorists.

Realizing these goals there is a need to identify the events that need to be processed/notified/acted upon from the video stream.  Some are required in real-time - for example stop fights or eliminate accidents.  There are various other uses of use of video streams as source of events,  I guess that within the "Internet of Things" infrastructure, cameras are important part - while some work on detecting events out of streams exist (e.g. identify car license plate numbers for automatic tolls in roads),  more work is needed to fully exploit the opportunities here

Evented API

I have written in the beginning of this year about the fact that standard APIs is now an emerging trend,  and about the benefit of having standard API for event processing.  No standard yet but I came across "evented API specification" developed by Kynetx.   While the terminology is not entirely consistent with the terminology I am using, it is interesting to review such works, and advance into standard APIs in this area.