PLAY Project News

Event-driven interaction in large service systems

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PhD defense of Roland Stühmer

Roland Stühmer from PLAY has his PhD defense in Karlsruhe on July, 17th:

I am pleased to invite you to my PhD defence which will take place on Thursday July 17th at 1 p.m. in Karlsruhe at KIT.

Title: Web-oriented Event Processing

The jury is composed of the following people:

Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Prof. Dr. Opher Etzion, Academic College of Emek Yezreel

Prof. Dr. Thomas Setzer, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Prof. Dr. Jan Kowalski, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Abstract:

Event processing – computing performed on occurrences happening in a system or domain – is a common methodology of dealing with real-time data where situations must be detected in real-time. Event processing research and products today provide a good understanding and support for closed-domain systems such as enterprises. On the Web real-time results also gain interest as more and more data are available in data streams. Examples are social activity streams or sensor readings. Requirements for event processing on the Web are different from those in closed-domain systems. The question then arises as to howtheWeb can be made situationaware. In this thesis we collect the requirements for a Real-time Web and answer the posed question by contributing the design and realisation of aWeb-oriented event processing system to manage events, streams and queries.

The presented result is a semantic system that serves as an Event Marketplace: heterogeneous events from the Web modelled in RDF are matched and integrated using a processing language we designed and describe in this work. The system consists of these main components: an event processing layer to combine, integrate, filter and derive events quickly, in memory, and a storage layer to maintain historic events augmenting the real-time layer with long-term queries. Event-driven applications are implemented on this architecture by expressions in our language supporting hybrid queries combining both real-time queries (on pushed data) and historic queries (on pull data). A governance component enforces efficient access control on event streams and storage. The main contributions of the system design are its Web-orientation by adhering to open and extensible standards, its processing language offering the combination of real-time and historical queries on events and its governance capabilities creating a multi-tenant system based on permissions. The system usesWeb technologies such as Linked Data, RDF and SPARQL to model, organize, locate, process and control access to events.

We evaluate the artefacts produced as part of this work using qualitative and quantitative measures: Qualitative comparisons are made with the State of the Art and the overall cost of ourWeb-based approach is determined quantitatively and compared to a non-Web-based solution as the baseline.

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PhD defense of Laurent Pellegrino

Laurent Pellegrino from PLAY has his PhD defense in Sophia Antipolis on April 3rd: I am pleased to invite you to my PhD defence which will take place on Thursday 3rd April, at 1.30pm, in the Euler Violet room at INRIA Sophia Antipolis.

You are warmly invited to the traditional "pot de thèse" that follows the presentation.

Title: Pushing dynamic and ubiquitous event-based interaction in the Internet of services: a middleware for event clouds.

The jury is composed of the following people:

Ioana MANOLESCU, Inria Saclay - Île-de-France (reviewer)

Etienne RIVIÈRE, Université de Neuchâtel (reviewer)

Johan MONTAGNAT, CNRS (examiner)

Ester PACITTI, Université de Montpellier 2 (examiner)

Vivien QUÉMA, Grenoble INP (examiner)

Françoise BAUDE, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (advisor)

Fabrice HUET, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (co-advisor)

Abstract:

RDF has become a relevant data model for describing and modeling information on the Web but providing scalable solutions to store and retrieve RDF data in a responsive manner is still challenging. Within the context of this thesis we propose a middleware devoted to storing, retrieving synchronously but also disseminating selectively and asynchronously RDF data in a fully distributed environment. Its purposes is to allow to leverage historical information and filter data near real-time. To this aims we have built our system atop a slightly modified version of a 4-dimensional Content Addressable Network (CAN) overlay network reflecting the structure of an RDF tuple. Unlike many existing solutions we made the choice to avoid hashing for indexing data, thus allowing efficient range queries resolution and raising interesting technical challenges. Near realtime filtering is enabled by expressing information preferences in advance through content-based subscriptions handled by a publish/subscribe layer designed atop the CAN architecture. We have proposed two algorithms to check RDF data or events satisfaction with subscriptions but also to forward solutions to interested parties. Both algorithms have been experimentally tested for throughput and scalability. Although one performs better than the other, they remain complementary to ensure correctness. Along with information retrieval and dissemination, we have proposed a solution to enhance RDF data distribution on our revised CAN network since RDF information suffers from skewness. Finally, to improve maintainability and reusability some efforts were also dedicated to provide a modular middleware reducing the coupling between its underlying software artifacts.

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The EIT ICTLabs use the PLAY platform as an RDF event processing and storage engine!

The reports from ICTLabs (find them in our publication section) explain how to integrate PLAY with Matlab in the context of multimodal mobility to integrate traffic prediction information.

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Highlights from PLAY Project

PLAY has had its final review meeting on Tuesday, November 26th, 2013.

Notable highlights from the project are:

—Use of open Web Standards for event modelling, pattern modelling, access control for real-time/streaming data

—Integrated Prototype (delivering a runnable architecture with all Open Source components)

Contribution to Open Source community, e.g. continued maintenance of RDF2Go, MultiActive objects for ProActive

Benefits PLAY can provide as a semantics-based event-driven platform for a use case of nuclear crisis management:

Eliminating superfluous, inaccurate or irrelevant information

Automating some analysis or actions based on predefined business rules

Reducing the time of information transmission between devices, stakeholders and decision makers

Increasing the reliability of knowledge (exhaustiveness)

Improving the agility capability of the crisis stakeholders

—Benefits and opportunity PLAY can provide as an Event-driven Architecture and elastic platform to ORANGE Telecom:

QoS problems experienced by customers of LiveBox Pro can be detected in real-time

Improvement of knowledge about customer experience, reduction of after-sales costs with residential customers of 2G/3G data mobile services

Ability to to compare/challenge other Open Source platforms with PLAY such as Storm/kafka  + Hadoop/Hbase and commercial middleware products

Links:

Opher Etzion (who is reviewer of PLAY together with Silvia Vecchi) blogged about PLAY: http://epthinking.blogspot.de/2013/11/on-play-project.html

Project reports and published papers are here: PLAY publications

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New publications by partner INRIA are online:

FastCast: a Throughput- and Latency-efficient Total Order Broadcast Protocol

An Optimal Broadcast Algorithm for Content-Addressable Networks

Multi-threaded Active Objects

A Distributed Publish/Subscribe System for RDF Data

See: http://www.play-project.eu/publications

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We are organising next year's I-ESA 2014 in Albi, France

I-ESA 2014 (Interoperability for Enterprise Systems and Applications  http://2014.i-esa.org/) organized by Ecole des Mines d'Albi-Carmaux from PLAY on behalf of InterOp VLab (and the GSO Pole) in Albi next March (24-28 of March 2014).

This conference concerns mainly (but not only) collaboration of organizations, associated scientific aspects, methodological aspects and technological aspects. The specific thematic for this seventh edition is the following : INTEROPERABILITY FOR AGILITY, RESILIENCE AND PLASTICITY OF COLLABORATIONS. Application fields are obviously numerous (manufacturing, crisis management, health, logistics, etc.). There will also be a workshop day, dedicated to presents concrete results (especially regarding funded collaborative projects). A doctoral symposium will open the week and demo sessions will allow to mix academic vision and industrial vision.

You can fin the call for papers on the website of the conference (http://2014.i-esa.org/cfp.html). Of course do not hesitate to submit articles, workshop subjects and to transfer this message to potentially interested people.

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New publications presented at PRO-VE'13 conference

Meet us at PRO-VE'13 conference from Sep 30th to Oct 2nd 2013 in Dresden, Germany. We present three papers from PLAY:

"A Platform for Event-Driven Agility of Processes: A Delivery Context Use-Case"

"Collaborative Process Flexibility Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making"

"PLAY: Semantics-Based Event Marketplace"

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Frédérick Bénaben from PLAY is co-chair for the track:

Collaborative Platforms for Sustainable Logistics and Transportation

at IEEE DEST conference this year.

Abstract:

Across application domains, organizations and enterprises (such as Small-Medium Enterprises) gain their strengths from flexible market orientation, agile value chains and cluster-based innovation capacity. The changing global (business) environment challenges all organizations to aim for agility and performance-driven management through process-focused thinking. These challenges reach far beyond the business world, affecting for example the formation and coordination of emergency teams in case of environmental disasters.

[...]

We are looking for papers that address medium-scale/large-scale and medium-term/long-term challenges for collaboration in the domain of logistics, including risk-management scenarios (e.g. after the occurrence of an environmental disaster), and that indicate/demonstrate potential solutions.

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Tutorial Personal Big Data Management at DEBS 2013 conference

We are presenting a tutorial at DEBS 2013 conference on:

Personal Big Data Management in Cyber-physical Systems

Abstract:

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) represent engineered systems where functionalities and salient characteristics emerge from the networked interaction of computational and physical components. Example CPSs include automobiles, aircraft, air traffic control, power grids, oil refineries, medical devices, patient monitoring, and smart structures. One of the main challenges for these systems is the real-time processing of various signals coming from different sensor-based subsystems. In this tutorial we 1) present how these challenges, mainly related to the Internet of Things and Big Data processing, can be interpreted in the context of the Event Processing Grand Challenge, a roadmap for the EP community established at Event Processing Dagstuhl Seminar 2010, 2) elaborate on current efforts in developing an event-driven platform that supports the above mentioned requirements and 3) present examples from three real-life scenarios (remote patient monitoring, adaptive augmented reality museum experience, and collaborative software development).

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Special Session at PRO-VE'13 conference

We are organizing a Special Session at PRO-VE'13 conference this year titled:

Event-Driven Collaborative Network

Abstract:

Supervision of events, emitted by connected devices (of any type), may be used to support lifecycle of collaborative networks (CN). This workshop will try to focus on the links between events, objects and CN: how Internet of Things (IoT) could facilitate collaboration thanks to events. Event gathering is a way to (i) detect opportunity or necessity of collaboration (between individuals and/or organisations), (ii) collect relevant knowledge to define the way collaborative networks should behave, (iii) perform monitoring, orchestration or choreography of collaborative behaviours and (iv) ensure efficient feedback while dismantling collaborative networks. Many technical and scientific issues are associated with this subject: publish / subscribe and distribution of events, semantic treatment of events, scalability and big data, social and trust, governance and choreography, etc. Articles submitted to this workshop should present event-based environments. Articles should focus on one (or several) of these stages of CN lifecycle and should also consider some of the technical or scientific issues presented above. Concrete use-cases should also be considered as far as they provide concrete vision of the usefulness of such environments.

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Internship offer: PLAY is hiring

Internship position at INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France) EPIs OPALE and OASIS Funded by EIT KIC ICT Labs:

“Intelligent adaptive transport systems”

Internship Description:   OPALE specific part: Macroscopic  traffic  flow  models  allow  describing  the  spatio-temporal  evolution  of  traffic density.  Their  sound  mathematical  structure consisting  of  partial  differential  equations  of hyperbolic  type  and  the  related  efficient  numerical  schemes  enable  fast  computations  to monitor  traffic  evolution.  The  selected  candidate  will  apply  these  models  to  detect  and/or predict problematic situations and offer (almost) real time solutions. The numerical schemes are programmed in Matlab and on the C++ platform Num3sis (see  http://num3sis.inria.fr/), and could, if necessary for the aim of this internship, be re-programmed in Java.  The goal of the internship is not primarily to design, program, such equations, as some numerical codes already exist. However, given the competencies of the selected candidate, it can be envisioned to also contribute in designing and programming new numerical codes.

OASIS specific part: Input data injected  within  such predictive  numerical  computations  and the resulting output will  be  taken  and  provided  as  events.  Indeed  the  main  goal  of  the  internship  will  be  to succeed to connect the numerical computations with a sophisticated platform, named PLAY.   PLAY platform has been designed by the EU funded STREP project PLAY (see http://play-project.eu). Its role is to collect events, semantically described using web-semantic standards (e.g. the RDF format),  reason  upon these  events by  combining them thanks to  a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, thus producing new (complex) events. The new events have also  to  be  described  in  RDF.  Events  can  be  delivered  to  interested  third-party,  which  are usually  services,  which  have  subscribed  to  such  events  (topic  and  content-based subscriptions).  Thus  third-party  end  services  get  the  possibility  to  react,  adapt  to  some relevant events describing some specific situation that have been detected by PLAY.

Internship work: The  original  aspect  of  the  subject  is  to  combine  a  relevant  traffic  evolution  model  with  a platform (PLAY) for events processing capable to gather and generate events about a specific situation happening in the context of transportation, more precisely in the context of multi-modality transportation (i.e. mix of public transportation, pedestrian, car, bicycle, etc) . These events will not only be generated through the specific transportation-related complex event processing  rules  (deployed  at  the  CEP  level,  e.g.  to  suggest  the  most  suited  transportation mode at a given point in the journey), but will also result from on-demand calculations of the numerical  schemes  which  will  enrich  the  overall  traffic  management  with  the  detection  or even prediction of problematic traffic situations (yet in a single transportation mode).

More details:

http://www-sop.inria.fr/oasis/index.php?page=position&action=show&id=63

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Talk at OW2Con 2012

Christophe Hamerling from PLAY presented at OW2 Con this year.

Slildes:

  OW2-PLAY @ ow2con 2012 from Christophe Hamerling

See also: 

Christophe's Wiki

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PLAY is now an OW2 project

The PLAY project has been accepted at OW2:

http://ow2.org/view/ActivitiesDashboard/PlayEventMarketplace

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Internet of Services: Collaboration meeting, October 2012

We were at the Internet of Services: FP7 Projects Collaboration meeting on 16-17 October 2012 in Brussels.

Slides from our working group are here:

Towards the Social Event-based Internet of Services [with slides]

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Workshop on Socially Intelligent Computing (SINCOM 2012)

Gregoris Mentzas from PLAY is co-chairing the 1st International Workshop on Socially Intelligent Computing (SINCOM 2012), part of the OnTheMove OTM Federated Conferences and Workshops 2012 (OTM'12) held in Rome, Italy, 13 - 14 September 2012.

Call for papers

From the CfP:

The International Workshop on Socially Intelligent Computing (SINCOM) provides a forum on the study, design, development and evaluation of the emergent intelligence that human-computer systems demonstrate. Socially intelligent computational systems bring together people and computers, support the creation of radically new forms of collaboration, communication and intelligence and allow the generation of new, emergent behaviors. Socially Intelligent Computing research is closely related to two other areas of research: “social computing”, i.e. the design and use of information and communication technologies that consider social context; and to the field of “collective intelligence”, i.e. systems that facilitate the collective behavior of groups of individual actors – people, computational agents, and organizations – and exhibit intelligent characteristics such as perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving.

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Distributed Event-Based Systems conference (DEBS 2012)

Meet us at the 6th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems in Berlin on July 16-20, 2012.

Project PLAY will take part in:

presenting our Tutorial: Where Event Processing Grand Challenge meets Real-time Web: PLAY Event Marketplace

co-organizing the Grand Challenge in collaboration with project SRT-15 for a competition aimed at both research and industrial event-based systems

presenting our Short Paper: A Goal Driven Dynamic Event Subscription Approach

presenting our Demo: Where Events Meet Events: PLAY Event Marketplace

If you would like to meet us please join us for one of the events or contact us!

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Workshop: Towards the Social Event-based Internet of Services (TSEbIS)

Gregoris Mentzas from PLAY is chair of the upcoming workshop TSEbIS ("Towards the Social Event-based Internet of Services") about leveraging Social Networking, Linked Data and the Real-time Web for the Future Internet.

TSEbIS is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday 20.06.2012 (see the conference programme) located at the ICE-Conference 2012 in Munich. The workshop is organised jointly with the two other FP7 projects SocIoS and Omelette.

Description: The evolution towards the Future Internet will largely be based on three inter-connected directions: (i) social networking within and across companies; (ii) the use of Linked Open Data and (iii) the trend towards the real-time event web. The aim of this workshop is to present the main technological challenges in these three areas and outline the proposed solutions and indicative usage scenarios of three European Union research projects: SocIoS, Omelette and PLAY.