“Technology evolves toward human needs.” This is a quote from one of my mentors early in my career, Avron Barr, one the pioneers in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In fact, he wrote and edited the “Handbook of Artificial Intelligence”. You might think this is a counterintuitive quote, given his background. But it’s in fact, profound. Amidst visionary computing ideas, the whole reason for a new technology is that it must serve human needs, or it dies.
Today, one certain human need is how to cope with too much data or too much complexity. Things have changed since the early AI days, with computing hardware and processing power becoming very inexpensive, and an increasing ability to “instrument” and measure the enterprise with middleware, adapters and sensors.
We can record all sorts of minutiae. This ability may seem to feed the information overload monster, but it also evolves into technologies such as Complex Event Processing (CEP), which helps create meaningful information out of the overabundance of data.
I have spent my career introducing new ideas and new technologies, mostly in software, and I always try to follow the original maxim from Avron. So when it comes to CEP, is this an idea, a technology that solves a human need?
This blog is one way for us to find out. I’ve asked Tim Bass, Paul Vincent, Puneet Arora, David Luckham and others to contribute, so you should expect some interesting and perhaps controversial ideas to be espoused here. As always, your feedback is critical.
