As I mentioned yesterday, today's focus of the EPTS meeting is technology. The morning keynote is Susan Urban,Texas Tech. University, Reactive Behavior and Data Management Research Lab. Susan's background is in active database systems background, and is current doing research in distributed event systems. Here are my notes from her talk:
Recap of Recent Activity in Event Processing
- David Luckham's Pioneering Work, The Power of Events, Complex Event Processing Site
- Dagstuhl Event Processing Seminar, April 2007
- Event Processing Technical Society (that's this group)
Driving Forces for Maturity of EP
- Autonomic computing / Ambient Intelligence
- RFID / Monitoring Applications
- Personalization / Mobile Devices
- Intelligence Applications / Asynchronous Programming (gaming)
Key keyword is "intelligence", how to use events to create more intelligent applications to live better.
Some examples of these event-driven applications: business intelligence, autonomic computing, airline industry (air traffic, baggage, security), healthcare (epidemic, patient monitoring, RFID in-body monitoring), ambient intelligence (smart homes, smart cities, personalized mobile information systems), homeland security (storm evacuation, first responder systems, terrorism situational awareness, power / fuel / water system monitoring, environmental systems and more.
Research directions: language and semantics (event cloud, processing language); data mining, domain knowledge and agents (knowledge intensive task - contextual reasoning, complex event processing agents that learn); modeling, validation and correctness (eliminate false positives/negatives) and reliability; dashboards, GUI's and human in the loop (HCI for monitoring, visualizing large volumes of complex events in enterprise applications); storage and distributed/parallel processing; cloud computing (software, data, hardware and even events as a service); and event security (event spam, malicious events, event viruses)
Event processing is not paradigm shift, it is the way we currently live. "I want the world to respond to me when I walk down the street, drive my car, walk through my house, cruise the web, etc.".
Susan calls for more technical forums (industry and academia) on EP related topics:
- data management
- AI
- Software Engineering & Formal Methods
- HCI
- Security & Information Assurance
- Sensor Networks
- Distributed, Parallel, and High Performance computing
This was an interesting talk. I enjoy hearing about the bigger picture, both the potential and work still to be done. The laundry list of research items shouldn't preclude folks from exploring event processing. But, keep in mind there is still work to be done, especially if your problem domain is extremely complex.
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