Friday, September 23, 2011

On proton-based chips

Asimov talked about positronic brains for robots, maybe one step was the construction of proton-based chips, instead of the regular electronic-based computing (reference made by Rainer von Ammon on the complexevents forum).  The proton-based chips can have better potential to communicate with biological processes and serve as an actuator within the human body, even the human brain.    When we called our proactive computing project in the name "proton", we did not know about such a chip,  but it can have natural connection:  The proton system makes decisions that are carried out using the proton chip that serves as an actuator for the proton system.  Cool idea -- somewhat futuristic, but we are getting there.   While the scenarios we are working on now are still within the familiar domains,  I believe that the big potential of proactive systems are in robotics and computerized-control of biological processes.   

On human inability to make real-time decision

WW2, besides all the bad things it did to humanity, also accelerated thinking and technology in many areas, Winston Churchill's war room has advanced the methodology and practice of real-time decision making.  There are today many decision support systems that help decision makers to make quick decisions, however, Chris Webber from the Economist Intelligent Unit (EIU), who was one of the speakers in the Progress Software conference last week said that their studies show that the obstacle for getting quick decisions is the human decision maker that has difficulty to get quick decisions even if all information and decision support tools are available for that decision.    Maybe, in some circumstances, the human decision maker can be skipped and be replaced by an autonomic system that will be fed with goals and intentions and will make the actual decisions?    

Thursday, September 22, 2011

What's in a title?



Some people noticed that I've changed my title in LinkedIn and sent me queries about it.  I did not change my job today;  as I noticed that my business cards are about to end and I need to issue a new one, I thought that this is also a good time to re-think on the content, and determined that the title I have there today does not really reflect what I am doing, so I switched to a better title, principle investigator of the Proton project, which is part of the IBM Research's  "far reaching research" program (FRR), which we have extended, to explore the emerging paradigm of proactive event-driven computing.  In the past I moved from working on concrete project to a more general technical strategy role, and then coming back to research, in working on requirements and challenges on the next generations of event processing, and towards the end of last year I moved back to concentrate on a single project which I believe has a huge potential.     I have written about proactive computing before,  and we exposed some of the ideas in the DEBS'11 paper.
I'll write more about this project in the future, and of course I am still writing about general event processing issues.