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. 

On use of event processing in routing

Eric Roch, chief technologist of Perficient posted a question about the use of event processing for message routing rather than ESB, the router pattern is taken from the enterprise integration patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf that we cite several times in the EPIA book.  Roch mentions several reasons to use event processing, some of it  relates to non-functional characteristics such as low latency,  and in-memory management.   


I think that there is some continuum that relates to the routing requirements -  some of the routing decisions are quite simple, they are based on a predicate, typically on a value of a single attribute;  some are more complex, and the routing is determined according to a pattern that involves multiple messages, in other cases the routing decision might involved a structure like decision-tree or decision-table, yet in other cases the routing is determined according to probabilistic reasons.    


The better solution is not to have ESB and EP systems in isolation, and chose in each case what should be used, instead it is better to use a single programming model that includes all types of routing, and autonomic translation to implementation in various building blocks,  some of them are taken from event processing and some from ESB or traditional messaging systems,  this is the approach I prefer for event processing in general,   not stand-alone,  but synergistic with other technologies.    In 2008 I had a posting about event processing and ESB,  arguing that ESB is a natural carrier of event processing within a SOA architecture,  and indeed I think that we'll see more and more ESB products that are enriched by event processing capabilities. 

Pura vida

Pura vida  - means "pure life", is an expression that is being used in Costa Rica as: good morning, hello, response to the question "what's up?", general statement that life is good, thank you - and some others.  It is the motto behind life in Costa Rica.   We spent in Costa Rica 10 days (1 less than we planned),  and here are some impressions:

1.  Costa Rica is an excellent place for a trip in the nature - it has nice rain forests, rivers and volcanoes, as well beaches of the two oceans.
2. Animals -- you see them everywhere in nature.   There are various tours in foot, car and boat to see animals.   
3. The Parador hotel we stayed in the last 3 days of the trip is the best hotel I've ever been to (and I traveled all over the world). The picture above is the view from  the hotel room, it was elected several times as best hotel in central america (including Mexico), and best spa (I got there the best massage since my visit in Thailand in 2007), t it is located within a forest on a mountain overlooking the pacific  ocean in Manual Antonio,  it has various animals on site - a hawler monkey provided wake-up call in one of the days in 5am, with extremely loud voice, on the tree in front of the hotel room; a raccoon entered the daughters' room, when they did not close the balcony's door, and scared them a bit, other raccoons visited us at the dinner table,  and were scared away by the hotel staff.  An iguana caught some sun in the middle of the mini-golf course, and frogs have settled at night in the swimming pool. 
4. The local people in Costa Rica eat the same food - breakfast, lunch, dinner -- rice and beans and tropical fruits (in each they might have some supplements).   At the end we got tired from this food and escaped to the sushi menu at the Parador.
5. Rain -- Costa Rica has a lot of rain, especially in this season. It has a four day heavy rain storm at the pacific side, we had there in the last two of these in Monteverde, but we did most activities in the rain; luckily when we got to the beach the rain storm was over.
6. The road infrastructure cannot cope with the quantity of rain, thus many of the road have lot of holes, some of the main roads are not paved, and they call travelling in them as the "Costa Rican Massage".
7. Tourism has become the biggest industry in Costa Rica, over the last 25 years, which directed the education system towards this goal.   Most people can speak English.
8. The amount of Israelies we met was incredible given the distance and cost to get there,  it seems that it is now quite fashionable among Israelies who already explored Europe and USA to visit Costa Rica.
9. Iberia is the worst airline company I have ever used ---  in all aspects (including food),  the worst thing was that they did not let us get on the connection flight from Madrid to San Jose, Costa Rica, though we got to the gate 15 minutes before the scheduled flights, due to the fact that our flight from Israel was late 1 hour, and they decided they'll not have enough time to load the luggage, though we were 20 passengers coming on that flight, and the fact that they have 1 flight per day to Costa Rica, they did not agree to make any effort to get us on the flight.   They told us that since ELAL was responsible for the late flight - it is not their problem (we purchased the ticket from Iberia, and used Iberia ticket with code share).   We had to spend 24 hours in Madrid before getting on the next flight -- and lost the first segment of the trip (which is non-refundable as anything else in Costa-Rica).  I'll check if it is possible to sue Iberia for damages.   The attitude of their agents in Madrid was also very unfriendly - a big difference between the nice people of Costa Rica everywhere, and those of Spain). 
10. And on positive aspect --- Pura vida --- is a motto of positive thinking!

For more picture --- I am waiting that my daughters will put all the pictures taken on facebook. 

Now it is a lazy holiday -- back to work early next week, and already a business trip to Europe!