Break-out Sessions

1. Break-out Sessions August 16th – 21st, 2009 Organizer: Hans-Arno Jacobsen Open Collaborate Wiki at http://www.debs.msrg.utoronto.ca/collaborate Based on a similar event at DEBS’07 in Toronto. International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

2. Organization • Meet in small groups during three slots throughout the week • Adjourn in plenum on Friday to present discussion and results • Each group is given some guiding questions, but may define their own • Groups should be self-organizing, i.e., designate a scribe and a presenter International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

3. Loose Definition & Scope • All references to “systems” in the sequel are meant to refer to (non-exclusively): • Publish/Subscribe systems (pub/sub) • Event Processing systems (EP) • Event Stream Processing systems • Rule-based systems • Distributed Event-based systems • We are primarily argeting the scope of Events, Publish/Subscribe and Systems International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

4. Objectives • Engage and actively participate • Network and make new friends • Create awareness for relevant research problems • Collectively brainstorm on possible • Work towards a research agenda and road map • Build on foundations for these discussions International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

5. Outcome • The ideal outcome would be • One coherent deck of slides per group that we post on the summer school web • The tracking of group discussions in the Collaborate Wiki • A common public report for the broader community International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

6. Suggested Discussion Groups • Simulation & evaluation • Applications • Research agenda & road map • Marketing & advocacy • Practical limitations • Collaborations • Interoperability • Management issues • Others? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

7. Simulation & Evaluation How can experiments be more systematic and comparable? • Where can we obtain realistic workloads and data sets? • What benchmarks exist today and should exist in the future? • How have other communities developed and adopted benchmarks and data sets? • What are realistic models for workload generation? • What are good performance metrics? • What is a solid evaluation methodology? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

8. Applications What are the compelling applications, and how can we promote event-based application development? • How can we bring up a world-wide pub/sub network or event processing system? • What applications would drive the use, participation, and adoption of such a system? • Can we run a generic event processing system playground across dedicated nodes? • Who would/should the users be? • Pub/Sub researchers, other researchers, application developers, end-users? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

9. Applications cont.’d • What are killer applications for distributed event-based systems? • How can event-based systems help build global sensor networks? • How can small-scale actuator/sensor networks (e.g., in an e-home scenario) profit from pub/sub? • What apps are the low hanging fruit for adoption? • What applications today are naturally modeled with events, are easy to implement, are widely used, would benefit from events & pub/sub and EP? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

10. Research Agenda & Road Map What are the interesting and relevant problems & questions in event processing research? • What are exciting research challenges that the community should look at? • What research questions have been neglected in the past? • Unification • What important synergies with other areas need to be explored and developed? • One-size-fits-all • Federation, integration, and interoperation of systems designed for constrained environments (e.g. sensor networks) with systems designed without these constraints International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

11. Marketing & Advocacy How can we better sell the event-based paradigm? • What are the key selling points of pub/sub and EP? • Decoupling, push based, asynchronous communication? • What are the “competing” paradigms? • Tuple spaces, (active) relational databases, streams, CQs? • What are the difficulties in getting pub/sub & EP accepted? • Unfamiliarity with model • No killer app • Databases (pull model) can do everything • No consistent terminology • Why aren’t tuplespaces, active databases popular, or are they? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

12. Practical Limitations What are the limitations of pub/sub and EP when it comes to implementing real applications? • Lack of precise semantics • Security • Fault-tolerance • Transactions (what does this mean in this context) • Lack of an established “query” language & model • Overhead • Due to decoupling • Due to statelessness • Hard to program/debug • No persistent data (integration with databases) International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

13. Collaborations How can our community collaborate better within and outside itself? • What are the pre-requisites for successful collaborations? • At what level and scale can collaborations be carried forward • Benchmarks, applications, systems? • How can joint, collaborative research efforts be boot-strapped and lead? • What sources of joint funding exist? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

14. Collaborations cont.’d • How can we expand the community to include researchers from related fields? • How do we relate to efforts in • Databases, streams and continuous query processing • Event processing & complex event processing • ECA rules and active databases • How do we want to position ourselves as a community? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

15. Management Issues How can we manage systems scalably? • How can we deploy, configure and manage systems scalabely? • How do we ensure that the end-to-end QoS issues are met? • What about multidimensional QoS issues (e.g., real-time + fault tolerance + security)? • How can we manage QoS in heterogeneous environments? • What are common manageable units and options in systems? • Can a common standardized system be specialized (i.e., customized, optimized) by tools and made suitable for different use cases • Are there common management patterns across different systems? • Can we build management tools for systems that operate in a heterogeneous environment and still adhere to QoS? • Are there use cases for reconfiguration and redeployment in systems? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

16. Interoperability & Standards How should standardization efforts proceed? • What parts of the system should be subjected to standardization? • Data formats, APIs, programming models? • What should not be standardized? • What concepts are most in flux, application dependent, etc. • What standards exist today in this space? • What are their limitations? • What standards should exist? International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

17. Discussion in Break-out Sessions • Strike break-out sessions and members • Tasks for break-out sessions • Designate one or preferably more scribes • Discuss by roughly aiming to answer the questions asked • Prepare a 10 minute summary on results of discussion • Add final feedback to Wiki (scribes !!) International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

18. Break-out Session Rooms • To be determined International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009