Biography

Dr. Opher Etzion

Dr. Opher Etzion is IBM Senior Technical Staff Member; Event Processing Scientific Leader in IBM Haifa Research Lab, and chair of the EPTS (Event Processing Technical Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Processing_Technical_Society).

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 blogging about event processing since August 1997 (http://epthinking.blogspot.com/).

He is a co-author (with Peter Niblett) of the first comprehensive technical book in the event processing area: Event Processing in Action (Manning, 2010) (http://www.manning.com/etzion/ )

In parallel he serves as an adjunct professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, teaching an event processing course.  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, co-authored the book “Temporal Database – Research and Practice”, Springer-Verlag, 1998, and supervised 25 PhD and MSc theses.  Prior to joining IBM in 1997, he has been a faculty member and founding head of the Information Systems Engineering area at the Technion, and held professional and managerial positions in industry and in the Israel Air-Force.

Title: Event Processing - Past, Present, Future

Analysts have marked Event Processing as the most growing segment in enterprise computing during the last couple of years and this trend is expected to continue.  Many the large and medium software companies (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, Progress Software and TIBCO) are now offering event processing platforms as well as 30 smaller companies. This area is now extensively coverage by analysts, establishment of a dedicated research community, books and academic courses.
The event processing commercial products are mostly descendents of research projects rooted in multiple disciplines, some of them are data management disciplines (active databases, data stream management, temporal databases) and some are rooted in other areas (discrete event simulation, distributed computing, formal verification).
 
The tutorial is intended for a technical audience that is interested in deep dive into understanding event processing.  The audience will gain insights about event processing:  What it really means? Where does it come from?  How it relates to research concepts (e.g. stream computing) as well as enterprise computing terms (e.g. Business Rules Management Systems)? The audience will also gain insights into the current state of the art, the leading architectures, the basic building blocks of event processing, and the various programming styles exemplified by code examples.  Last but not least, the audience will gain insights about the current trends, and the research challenges that exist, this part will be based on the discussions in the Event Processing Dagstuhl seminar that was  held in May 2010.

This tutorial provides a deep dive on topics of: architecture, contexts and patterns of event processing.  It explains the notions of event processing network and its different parts, and discusses implementation issues and optimization criteria and solutions and outline research challenges.

Click for slides in PowerPoint