We have just completed a few days of non-stop meetings with highly valued and appreciated TIBCO clients in London, Tower 42. Mike Saxton, who leads TIBCO’s financial and energy practice in EMEA, and his team in London are absolute top shelf professionals! We enjoyed very interactive and exciting meetings with top energy, banking and on-line payment centre customers. The main agenda topic was security event management (SEM) in the context of CEP and fraud detection. I’ll blog more on this topic after my TUCON presentation on the same topic coming soon in San Francisco – hope to see you there!
We have reached cruising altitude on our British Airways 777 back to the colonies, so I thought this might be a good time to share some foundational thoughts about TIBCO BusinessEvents™ in the context of gaming, artificial intelligence and modelling. In the April 19, 2007 Guardian there is an excellent article titled The hard-thought race for intelligent gaming by Alexander Gambotto-Burke. In this article, the author discusses the fact that the technology that governs how games play, react and adapt – the AI – remains relatively primitive compared to advances in graphics and visuals. Every action in a game must be anticipated and the more sophisticated AI would allow games to adapt to players actions in real-time.
Steve Grand is an AI researcher, android hobbyist and one of the few designers in the world with the distinction of having created a successful game, Creatures, driven by what some would call “true AI.†In the Guardian article Steve says, “Most of what counts as AI in industry is actually a bunch of IF/THEN statements.†He goes on to discuss biological modelling with virtual objects that are assembled together to create a composite digital object that lives, acts, breeds and evolves. He concludes that AI will eventually revolutionize gaming.
Interesting enough, and by design, TIBCO BusinessEvents™ (BE) is designed around creating virtual models of the components of an event processing application. At the core of each virtual model in BE is an object called a Concept, in BE terms. A Concept is basically an object comprised of a collection of Properties, represented as name-value pairs, like integers, real numbers, strings, Boolean values and more complex data types. For example, in the world of gaming, a “creature†is a complex composite software object, composed of many other virtual objects and sub-objects. A hand, or claw, is a complex composite object of sub-objects like bones, with properties like bone density, flexibility and the ability to heal when injured. A virtual representation of a human hand is a composite object of other virtual objects, such as the finger object. A thumb, for example, can be a polymorphic instantiation of the finger object. Inheritance, overloading, encapsulation and polymorphism are all important and fundamental modelling principles in gaming applications.
As I mentioned in my last blog entry, modern software applications require object-oriented properties such as encapsulation, polymorphism, overloading and inheritance to facilitate complexity management and object reuse in software design. Just as this OO design principle is true in modelling and designing modern gaming applications of today, OO principles are critical for modelling and designing any truly complex event processing application in the business world.
Over the next few months we will expand on these OO modelling and design principles and we will relate these same principles to the design philosophy of CEP and TIBCO’s BusinessEvents, introducing how BE Concepts may be used in conjunction with another important class of objects available in BE – simple, composite and concurrent state-machines. We will also invite Dr. David Luckham, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and author of the seminal book on CEP, The Power of Events, to kindly join us in discussing his background in AI and how his distinguished career led him to his work in developing models, semantics and processing syntax for debugging large, distributed systems – the very foundation of the evolution of the processing model Dr. Luckham now refers to as complex event processing.
In closing today, I would like to thank Alan Lundberg, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Business Optimization products at TIBCO, for setting up our CEP blog. Alan is a great guy with many years of product marketing experience in AI-based systems. There are few people in the world more passionate about CEP than Alan, and we are lucky at TIBCO to have such talent on the BE team. I’ll also be introducing other team members, including our exceptionally talented Palo Alto engineering team, as we get more deeply under the hood of a truly remarkable Silicon Valley engineered product we are all very proud of – TIBCO BusinessEvents™.
