TIBCO acquires Streambase

The hot news of today in the event processing perspective is undoubtedly the acquisition of Streambase by TIBCO.   For some time I wondered when Streambase is going to be acquired and by whom as it stayed the largest independent event processing vendor.  Today in the world of merging and acquisitions, such companies are attractive to complement the portfolio of bigger vendors.   

Mark Palmer, Streambase CEO (until now) - announced the acquisition on Streambase's Blog, Mark also recorded a short message that can be found on Streambase's home page.   Chris Taylor described the acquisition from the TIBCO side.    Chris emphasized Streambase capabilities in the big data space.  

It is interesting to see how the "event processing portfolio" of TIBCO will evolve now, and how the synergy between Streambase and the existing event processing portfolio will be realized.

Anyway - interesting move, congratulations to my friends from both sides of this merge, and good luck! 

Proactive event processing for intelligent transportation system

I came across a new publication whose citation is: " Yongheng Wang, "A Proactive Complex Event Processing Method for Intelligent Transportation Systems," Lecture Notes on Information Theory, Vol.1, No.3, pp. 109-113, Sept. 2013. doi: 10.12720/lnit.1.3.109-113".   This paper is a follow-up to our work on proactive event-driven computing,  and applies events coming from the Internet of Things towards intelligent transportation system, proactively mitigating traffic congestion.  This work originates in China, who made Internet of Things as its flagship project.   We have looked at similar problem  as one of our use cases for EU project proposal (that did not win the lottery).

  

Academic use of event processing for trading education in UIC

I have written before about academic courses on event processing that are typically given in computer science or information systems academic programs.  Recently I came across a report on academic course in University of Illinois in Chicago, that is given in the Finance program of its business school using the  OneTick product.   The product is used for education in financial markets and trade simulation labs.  This is a case of use of event processing to support business functions, and it will be interested to view more of it, both in trade and other business areas.    

Event processing in gaming: SAP and Bigpoint

Jeff Wooton from SAP posted on the SAP event processing blog a video clip showing a project done with Bigpoint, which is a gaming company, to get events from players in real-time and make offers to players based on their progress in the game and prediction of patterns of their behavior.   The solution is based on Hana, SAP in-memory technology, and I guess on their event processing technology also, though the video does not give much details about the actual implementation. The goal is to maximize profit by personalize sells to game players.   Event processing has various applications in game playing, as game has event-driven behavior nature, and also in dynamic personalization, which is applicable to other areas as well.

More on fraud detection from IBM - the MoneyGram case

I have recently written about real-time fraud detection solution from IBM based on SPSS and CICS. 

Another solution from IBM in the fraud detection space has been recently highlighted by David Luckham in his site citing a Forbes article.   This solution is based on the "Entity Analytics" solutions (specifically the Infosphere Identity Insights product.    David Luckham comments "that are a lot of CEP under the hood of  this stuff".  This is true.    After the acquisition of SRD by IBM, our team in IBM Haifa Research Lab helped integrating our work on Amit as embedded part in the Entity Analytics -  (see the DEBS 2010 presentation by Ella Rabinovich on Industry Experience with Amit - slide 3).   This integration seems to have survived all these years and being employed for useful purposes. 

In any event,  there are many solutions in which event processing is integrated with other technology to create specific solution, and we can see alliances between event processing technology and other technology in this area.

On Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand had a significant impact on me when I was young.  I read her books while being a teenager, and was captured by her ideas.   Recently, her two famous books "The fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" gained new translations to Hebrew, which was a good opportunity to read them again after many years.  

In retrospect, there was something naive in my attitude to Ayn Rand's book as a young person, there is also a lot of misinterpretations of her ideas in the universe, one of them is the claim that this is a basis for conservative thinking. Ayn Rand was far from being conservative in the political sense.    

However, two things I have taken from Ayn Rand, escorted me all my life:

The ability to "swim against the current"  and take what other people think of me with a grain of salt (including my managers over all  the history),  and the strive for excellence in the mediocre culture around us.  

These two are blended together in Ayn Rand's books. 

 She puts the individual in the middle, rather than the society, and puts in the center of her stories individuals with some kind of excellence. 

Our current society seems to prefer mediocre people that meet metrics, rather than individuals who break out of the box (thus the metrics don't follow them).      A food for thought.

Prelude to the DEBS 2013 tutorial

The notable event of this week in our family was the wedding of our eldest daughter Anat. In the picture you can see Anat, her new husband Adi with my wife and myself, in fancy dresses.

It was also very loaded week at work, one of the items has been submitting extended abstract of the  tutorial that Jeff Adkins and myself are  planned to deliver in DEBS 2013.     So here is the tentative outline we submitted in the original proposal:

Outline  

Topic I:  Introduction – Brief history of event processing  

Topic II:  The major differentiation factors of event-based thinking

Topic III:  The ontology of events and event influence

Topic IV:  Anatomy of reactive systems 

Topic V: Pragmatics – a computational independent model for event-based systems 

The tutorial starts with follows some of my previous postings about "event oriented thinking",   and Jeff's 4D classification.  It analyzes the way that people think about systems in the conventional way vs. the way people think in event-driven fashion, and gets into the role of events in language, and in system modeling.  

Unlike the implementation oriented thinking we usually employ -- this is a computational independent thinking, it looks at the event-based systems from the customer's perspective.     See (at least some of) you in Arlington.