Event processing and mobile devices

The current big buzzwords in the IT world are: analytics,big data, cloud and mobile.   These are believed to be the most influential trends on the IT directions.  I have already written about analytics and big data in some previous post, today I'll write on the mobile universe from the point of view of event processing.  

Putting the mobile devise symbol on a drawing of an event driven architecture, we can view multiple roles:

1. Mobile device can be a producer of events -- this may be both implicit events, using the mobile devise as a sensor and tracking the location of the mobile device over time  or explicit events, where a human use mobile devise to report events (such as:  traffic jams, completion of tasks, start of the work day)
2. Mobile device can also serve as consumer of events -- subscription to either raw or derived events can be manifested within notification in form of Email, SMS, or mobile application.   It seems that most uses of mobile devises are the consumer and producer roles.    There are also some more sophisticated possible uses, discussed next.
3. One can build event processing agent logic using mobile devise, but it is more likely that the use in this case will be to use predefined templates in order to define specific instances of EPA. For example, if the application is subscription to events in my bank account, I might get a template giving me an opportunity to subscribe when my accounts reached a balance of more than X or less than Y, I received a deposit of more than Z, or that the total withdrawals for a single days are more than W.   Using the mobile device I can chose any of them and give value to the X, Y, Z, W variables.
4. A dashboard showing the real-time state considering the streaming events can be also displayed as a mobile application
5. Last but not least -- An EPA can reside on the mobile device itself,  collection data and doing some filtering or aggregation.

In a follow-up post I'll try to switch direction and look at event processing from the mobile point of view.

More - later.  

Towards proactive enterprise intelligence by Gregoris Mentzas

I came across a recent presentation given by Gregoris Mentzis (from NTUA, Greece) entitled "towards proactive enterprise intelligence".  In this presentation Gregoris discusses some research challenges.

The capabilities of proactive enterprise intelligence are defined in slide 21 and seem similar to our definition (I also recognized the pictures).  I'll write more about the two patterns expressed in this slide. 

Reading this presentation is recommended. Enjoy! 

Driving while looking at the rear-view mirror

Typically I don't recommend commercial Blogs, but I'll make an exception this time, and cite Mark Palmer's post, since I like the metaphor he made, reflected in this picture.  According to Mark, analytics that refers to the past is like driving by only looking at the rear-view mirror,  which of course can show the road you have already passed.  Since typically we drive forward and not backward it should be more useful to look ahead than to look back.   In many cases the road is fixed, in the sense that the road forward looks exactly like the road backward, and then it might make sense to do it,  however, in other cases, like driving in real traffic and not in a bubble, the road ahead may contain surprises that are not evident from the previous parts of the road. 

The interesting thing is that even law latency event processing system are, in fact, looking at the past,  where the past is almost the present,  looking to the future is not a standard event processing feature.   

On the city data management workshop in CIKM'12

I am one of the co-chairs of the "City Data Management 2012" workshop in CIKM'12 

The work on smart cities have been emerged in the last few years.  The data management aspect of smart cities is one of the major topics, due to the need to acquire significant amount of data, much of it streaming data, and perform monitoring, search, query and various analytics.  The workshop focuses on the several aspects of city data management.    The call for papers is now out,   the interesting part for me is the data monitoring part, which consists of the following points:

• Complex Event Processing for Smarter Cities
• Anomaly detection and prevention
• Forecasting city events
• Event-based optimization for adaptive city operations
• City process monitoring

If you are in this area -- consider submission. Note that the conference will take place in Maui, Hawaii.

On the right education for enterperneur

I came across an interesting discussion on the topic what is the right education for entrepreneurs.

According to the study cited in this article,  most of the entrepreneurs don't have degrees in computer science or engineering but in various other disciplines.   This echos the debated between Bill Gates who thinks that engineering education is the only one matters, and Steve Jobs who said that in Apple the DNA is mixed between engineering and liberal arts.

I have some perspective on this issue since I have enjoyed a diversified education. I did BA degree in Philosophy,  then went for MBA studies and learned the basic of business concepts, and then did PhD in Computer Science.  

More than 10 years ago I participated in the "basic blue" management course of IBM, this was a "private course" given for new managers in IBM Haifa Research Lab, since due to organizational changes, and addition of one more level of management, many new managers were appointed within a short period of time to justify bringing the course to us.   As a preparation of the course, the participants fill a substantial questionnaire, and there are also 360 view questionnaires form managers, peers and direct reports.  When showing the results the course's instructor said that he was surprised to see that 16 of the 18 participants had very similar personality profile.  The common denominator:  all of them studied in the Technion computer science or computer engineering, I was one of the two exceptions.    

While generalizations never properly work,  it seems that there is something in the engineering education that drive people to concentrate on the technical details and see their challenge in doing strong technical work, there is nothing wrong with it, any company small or big in the technology domain requires strong technical people.   

 Entrepreneurs require something beyond the technical skill,  they need the passion to change the world, to believe that they are doing the "next big thing".  This is another mode of thinking.  I have never been an entrepreneur (perhaps it is still not to late), but I have written about intrapreneuring   (trying to do "start-ups" within a big corporate) before. 

   

 If I need to reflect upon my past studies and see what contributed most to me, I view my studies as complementary.  The MBA studies contributed understanding of the basics of the business concepts,  the computer science studies contributed to the understanding of technology and the content of what I've been doing,  but the passion to change the universe, and the contribution to thinking out of the box was definitely been of the philosophy studies.  In retrospect they were most influential on shaping my personality.  

I am not surprised that many entrepreneurs are not engineers, there is something inherent in engineering education that makes people think in boxes.

More on the layered approach of the event-driven world

I have been asked by several people to write in more detail about what I meant  by the layered approach, so I thought it should be better illustrated in an architecture diagram (converting it to picture did not result in high quality, somehow).  The rationale behind it that event processing became pervasive in use, with both event processing products, and "build your own solution".    In the same way that application servers based on standards like J2EE contributed to building of certain type of web-based enterprise applications,  an application server for event-based applications is required to provide services from various types: from context service, adapters to sensor and mobile platforms, dashboard, management services, meta-data service and more.   The second layer is the agent layer which provide both directory of agents and tools to build your own agent.  The application is the third layer.   This architecture can provide independence, and ability to get best of breed in both services and functionality components from different sources, and combinations of "build" and "buy".

Standards are of course the key to make it happen.  

On robots for the elderly

I have always been fascinated by the potential of combination of event processing and robotics, and have written about it before, as well as followed some work in this area.   Recently I have read some material about EU project called ROBOT-ERA,  which is aimed at providing robot's support for the elderly.  Their plan is to create three type of robots for the elderly, which they call - domestic (for the room/apartment), condominium (for the bigger house/ home for the aged), and outdoor, with communication between the three types.  This system is obviously event-driven, but as many of the applications of the world it does not use COTS of event processing, but home-built solutions.    I think that while the event processing community concentrated in the COTS, it should also pay attention to help those who role their own --- I'll write more about it.

I also think that there is a huge  potential of smart systems and robots to help the elderly which sometimes the world looks to them very challenging,   Besides the EU projects there are other activities in this area in Japan, and Australia (watch this video). I assume there are others as well.  When such technology will become pervasive and affordable, it will have a significant impact on quality of life of elderly people.