Event Processing -- the next generation

Dr Opher Etzion
Active Management Technology Group, IBM Haifa Research Lab

Event Processing is one of the emerging areas both in the industry, evidence by the emergence of around 30 different products in the last few years, and as a research discipline. The talk is a self-contained talk that will provide introduction about the state of the practice using a collection of use cases, explain the trends, portray the vision for the next generation based on these trends, and summarize work that has already done, together with further research challenges. The talk will touch various issues starting from architectural principles, agent-oriented programming, even processing network, event flows, optimization criteria, strategies for parallel and distributed processing of large event processing networks, "event-at-a-time" processing vs. "set-at-a-time" processing and hybrid languages. Examples of open research problems will be provided, and short surveys of related research projects either in the IBM Haifa Research Lab or in the Technion will be briefly introduced.

Dr. Opher Etzion is IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, and Event Processing Scientific Leader in IBM Haifa Research Lab, Previously he has been lead architect of event processing technology in IBM Websphere, and a Senior Manager in IBM Research division, managed a department that has performed one of the pioneering projects that shaped the area of "complex event processing". He is also the chair of EPTS (Event Processing Technical Society), and is blogging about event processing since August 2007. In parallel he is an adjunct professor at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 papers in refereed journals and conferences, on topics related to: active databases, temporal databases, rule-base systems, complex event processing and autonomic computing, and co-authored the book "Temporal Database -- Research and Practice", Springer-Verlag, 1998. Prior to joining IBM in 1997, he has been a faculty member and Founding Head of the Information Systems Engineering department at the Technion, and held professional and managerial positions in industry and in the Israel Air-Force.