The last day of RulesFest covered a couple more interesting topics, such as:

• Mark Proctor on “Goal Oriented Programing”: this is interesting because it follows the TIBCO experiences with goals and plans driving complex dynamic business processes using tools like Active Fulfillment. Furthermore, these ideas are finding some concrete specifications in things like the OMG Case Management work (driving cases through case plans).
  [See also here].
• Alan Moore on “Deploying Knowledge Based Technologies In Embedded Systems” was one session I unfortunately missed due to a meeting; however it certain is very topical too with agent-based monitoring systems like TIBCO Hawk also being very suitable for the real-time control area (and indeed there was a paper at DEBS this year on a similar topic).
  [See also here].
• Andrew Ng covered “Machine Learning” via data - which is a fascinating topic and also one we are seeing in TIBCO with the integration of TIBCO Patterns (aka Netrics) in CEP tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents (and even in system monitoring rule engines  like TIBCO Hawk).
  [Also covered here].

RulesFest is a very friendly conference - short coffee breaks after every 50min session, power and wifi at the tables, and so on. CEP-relevant highlights from today’s sessions included:

• Kenny Shi from EBay presented on their fraud decision system’s use of rules. What was interesting from a decision management perspective was that EBay had classified their decisions by their being synchronous (e.g. part of an explicitly orchestrated process) or asynchronous (e.g. more generally event driven, for asynchronous actions). They had built a custom sequential (non-inferencing) rules engine to do this, rather than use their previous rules technology (IBM JRules) - and suffered some rule complexity issues as a result (with an inferencing rule engine you can split - and therefore re-use - rule components into different rules).
  Kenny described some of the interesting stats for their system:
  - 65% of their fraud processing time is in data retrieval (although it wasn’t clear why they have not exploited in-memory technology / data preloading to handle this)
  - the database (system) calls were described as “latency killers”: for example a 6ms DB call had to be added to a 25ms WAN network hop
  - they use 160 application servers for their asynchronous rules (!) and 300 application servers for their synchronous  rules (!!)
  [See also here]
• Emory Fry from the US Navy presented on their “Knowledge Management Architecture For Healthcare”, basically an advanced information sharing engine which also includes event processing capabilities.
  [See also here]
• Said Tabet - better known for his RuleML leadership, but now at EMC - gave a keynote on “Semantic Technologies and the Cloud”, and won the award for surviving the most scathing comment during his Q&A: “hearing about all these organisations and standards bodies getting involved in cloud deployments discourages me immensely about the future of deploying to the cloud!”.
  [See also here]
• In the “101″ sessions, I gave the standard CEP tutorial as given at a previous OMG workshop (downloadable here).
• Jacob Feldman presented on “Using Constraint Solvers to Validate and Execute Rules-based Decision Models” covered an interesting spread from decision modelling to decision execution via inference rules or constraint rules. More evidence of technology convergence!
  [See also here]

RulesFest moved to Burlingame (still Bay Area, CA USA) where arrivees on Sunday (like myself) initially had the minor shock of finding themselves in a tatoo artist conference (complete with anti-gang police presence, apparently!). Luckily they had moved on by Monday, avoiding potentially embarrassing delegate mix-ups…

A few CEP-related sessions today:

• IBM’s Daniel Selman looked at the various technology combination patterns of “Executing Processes, Taking Decisions and Detecting Situations”. Daniel discussed the stateful (short-term) CEP versus stateful (long-term) BPM versus stateless decisions, which is an interesting (if over simplistic IMHO) viewpoint that aligns, funnily enough, with IBM product division demarcation! [Also reported on here]

• Paul Haley gave a keynote on the “Roadmap for Rules, Semantics and Business” covering the future of knowledge processing, with honorable mentions to the Japanese 5th Gen computer project (highlight of the AI era), IBM’s Watson (text processing engine), and his own work with Paul Allen ’s Vulcan company’s Project Halo and the “Scalable Inference for Large Knowledge” engine (SILK). Paul also commented on the need for rule standards to avoid the mantra that as soon as knowledge is encoded it becomes “code” and therefore only manipulatable by “coders” - an interesting point as languages like OWL are not at all business friendly. He also viewed OMG SBVR as being more important as a logic formalism for this reason. [Also reported on here]

• Fred McClimans presented on Rules and Human Behavior - and specifically on the causality of human events. This is the other dimension of event analysis, in this case supporting information flows across communities / tribes / crowds. Modeling information flows in human systems was somewhat scuppered by what Fred described as “pervasive hyperconnectivity” - the fact that communities communicate across conventional boundaries (for example using Twitter).

• Mauricio Salatino presented on “Emergency Services - Processes Rules and Events” where he had used Drools (and a nifty simulation UI reminding me of a computer game) to provide an emergency response system. [Also reported on here]

My presentation simply re-iterated some of the results from customers’ use of TIBCO CEP technologies as presented at TIBCO’s user group (TUCON) as previously blogged. The main points were:

- Event-driven decisions are increasingly important in corporations. [For the TLA challenged, you can view this as the growth of EDD to support EDA (Event Driven Decisions and Architecture respectively)].

- Traditional BRMS strengths are not necessarily required (proprietary repository etc) - some customers exploit tools like Sharepoint and exploiting events to pass rules around (Event-based Rules Management).

- More “classic” business rule users like insurance companies are also finding value in CEP.

[Also reported on here].

It’s that time of year again - next week is the RulesFest conference (W coast USA), followed by the Business Rules Forum conference and RuleML workshop (co-hosted on the E coast USA). From a CEP perspective we have:

• RulesFest: a good selection of sessions on CEP-related matters, such as:
  • EBay’s Kenny Shi on a real-time decision platform and decisions as asssets.
  • IBM’s Daniel Selman on situations, decisions and processes, and probably giving an update on IBM’s efforts to merge their Business Events and Business Rules architectures.
  • Mauricio Salatino of Plug Tree (a Drools consultancy) is talking about rules, processes and CEP based on an emergency services demo.
  • Event Driven Rules and Experiences in CEP courtesy of TIBCO
  • Nate Derbinsky from the University of Michigan on scaling of memory for “Reactive Rule-based Agents” using SOAR.
• Business Rules Forum: this is part of the analyst-focused Building Business Capability conference that seemed wildly popular last year.
  • Nathan Bell of Pharmacy OneSource has built his own version of  a “massively parallel expert system” using Drools and Gigaspaces.
  • Paul Haley of Automata is presenting on the Semantics of Events.
  • TIBCO is presenting on what analysts need to know about business events…
  • I see also that EBay’s Kenny Shi is presenting here too, albeit on the economics of decisioning rather than real-time decisions.
• RuleML: this is the more technical part of the week versus BR Forum:
  • A keynote on Event-driven Rules: Experiences in CEP (from TIBCO)
  • Standards for Complex Event Processing and Reaction Rules by Adrian Paschke, Paul Vincent, Florian Springer, based on the Dagstuhl work
  • Supporting Data Consistency in Concurrent Process Execution with Assurance Points and Invariant Rules by Susan Urban, Andrew Courter, Le Gao and Mary Shuman
  • Probabilistic Event Calculus based on Markov Logic Networks by Anastasios Skarlatidis, Georgios Paliouras, George Vouros and Alexander Artikis
  • On Applying Temporal Database Concepts to Event Queries by Foruhar Ali Shiva and Susan Urban
  • Event Condition Expectation (ECE) Rules for Monitoring Observable Systems by Stefano Bragaglia, Federico Chesani, Paola Mello, Marco Montali, Davide Sottara and Emory Fry.

TIBCO is also sponsoring the BBC / Business Rules Forum event, and indeed TIBCO’s Nimbus CEO Ian Gotts is also presenting here. Looks like a busy 2 weeks - please look me up if you are attending any of these events!

The big problem with covering TUCON from a CEP perspective was that… there was so much involving CEP. Sessions I could not attend but CEP-relevant were:

• Event-driven healthcare
• IDC’s Maureen Fleming on Improving Customer Satisfaction and Profitability with Event Driven Systems
• TIBCO’s CEP “look ahead” - what is “in store” for event-driven technology
• Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini on In-Memory Computing and Thinking the Unthinkable Applications
• TriQuint on Rules to Live By: Prediction with Real-Time Data and Analytics
• JCPenney on Improving the Customer Experience
• KPN using CEP-based Active Fulfillment
• FedEx’s Kim McBride on Shipping to Your World On Time Every Time, covering their CEP-based application
• How Can Predictive Analytics Drive Brand Loyalty and New Business Opportunities, covering Spotfire S+ generating CEP rules
• etc.

In other news: we welcomed Unai Ormaetxea as the new head of Marketing for TIBCO BusinessEvents, and announced / presented on the future role of TIBCO Hawk in event processing (filtering events for processing in CEP engines like TIBCO BusinessEvents). I’ll do an update on the latter in a separate post…

Finally, a thanks to all the organisers of TUCON. A very impressive event. Plus I spoke to quite a few attendees who also had some very interesting use cases - hopefully they will present next year! And getting to hear train live was pretty good too!