One evening last week the British Computer Society hosted its annual Roger Needham lecture for 2010, and as the topic included covered real-time systems I thought (as indeed did at least one other CEP vendor!) to attend and learn more. The lecture was elegantly delivered by Dr Joel Ouaknine and his real-time example was a car databus which is instrumented for event capture and for which correlations/patterns are searched for between the primary functions (e.g. brake applied here and some vibration detected here – were these related?). Joel used Finite State Automata to demonstrate the issues of decidability (and therefore computability)… which although nicely explained I am not going to try and explain it here! An interesting lecture on some of the maths behind academic research, with some potential applications downstream in verifying CEP and ESP applications.
PS: slides will presumably appear on the BCS website in due course.
