Report from the Event Processing Symposium

Earlier this week, Sebastian Wrede and I visited the Fifth Event Processing Symposium. The symposium took place in beautiful Trento, in Italys northernmost region "Trentino-Alto Adige" (Alto Adige is better known as "Südtirol" to most Germans and Trentino is southwest of it).

Sebastian gave an invited talk about our event-based approach for robotics, which was quite well received. We didn't know the EPTS community at all before and I think Sebasitan managed to get our ideas across quite well and build a bridge to this community by identifying commonalities and differences. They invited us to join the society, which is promising :-)

The other attendees were largely from industry with a few academics amongst them. Industry included big names such as Oracle, Software AG, TIBCO, IBM and a few medium-sized companies such as Streambase, Starview and so on. These companies all sent major people, such as their CTOs or senior architects. From the adademic side, there were Arno Jacobson from Toronto (known for his pub/sub work in the DEBS community), Francois Bry from LMU, Adrian Paschke from HU Berlin and a few others I didn't speak to.

Check out the coffee break time:

I learned a lot and there is certainly some fodder for future blog posts about this, but for now, just a few tidbits:

• event processing is online (attendees often said "real-time", but not in the robotics sense)
• easy programming languages that allow laypeople (e.g. business analysts) to define what events to look for and what do with them seem to be an important component of the commercial success
• the definition of "event" is highly domain-specific, but it can be anything of interest
• most event-matching is currently rule-based but probabilistic methods and learning in general is coming
• currently popular domains for event processing are finance, IT management and business workflow
• on the communications level, the credo seems to be "make almost anything available efficiently". lots of producer-side filtered pub/sub going on.