[drools-research] Re: research ideas

Adrian Giurca giurca at tu-cottbus.de
Wed Nov 12 09:54:09 UTC 2008


Mark,
Thank you for the useful hints. We start now accommodating the project 
and come back with news.

All the best,
-AdrianG

Mark Proctor wrote:
> AdrianG,
>
> Btw I'm also CC'ing the Drools Research Network on this, 
> drools-research at redhat.com <mailto:drools-research at redhat.com>, not 
> sure if anyone is actually subscribed yet - heh, but might as well 
> start puting that facility to work.
>
> This is a current list of student projects, although we haven't 
> mainained it that well - i.e. CEP phase one is near enough done:
> http://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-10745
>
> Davide Sottara is doing some fascinating work on uncertainty with 
> drools, one of the interesting outcomes of this so far is he's 
> building a hybrid network - that is part discrimination network part 
> weighted learning network. He's doing this work for his phd, I don't 
> know if he is able to find some aspect of this suitable for a masters 
> student... I've put him in the CC, to see if he has any input.
>
> On CEP, according to the power of events book, by prof David Luckham, 
> we've done about 1% of his vision :(
> That said what drools will have working for 5.0 is support for the 13 
> temporal operators, like before, after etc, and support for sliding 
> time windows with automatic life cycle management of events for auto 
> retraction - using temporal distance calculations. While this is 
> pretty much on par with other "commercial" products, there is still a 
> lot more intersting things to do:
>
> Event abstraction
> creating events from another events, but keeping the association for 
> the reasoning. I tend to refer to this as composite events, but this 
> is a mutli levels beast. On the outside it seems simple, but there are 
> large depths to research, especially on the association side. Even if 
> we find a simple engineer solution for now, there will no doubt be a 
> lot more "theory" to explore that we won't have resources to do.
>
> Causality Tracking
> The ability to determine cause->effect relationships
>
> sequence and hierarchy matching events. This is where we are trying to 
> detect specific sequences of events like
> A, B, A but what happens if we have A, A, B, A  - do we capture the A, 
> B, A or do we capture the A, A, B, A and just ignore the second A. 
> Then also as you know composite events (see event abstraction above) 
> can result from matching other events, creating a hierarchy, so we 
> need to detect these hierarchies. I know there is a lot of demand for 
> this, and it's something we will probably research ourselves next 
> year, but there is probably more researhc for this at an indepth 
> academic level, as ours will be engineering focused.
>
> Verification of events
> Extending our vertifier to handle all the temporal analysis, to find 
> warnings, hints, mistakes etc.
>
> Testing
> We need new ways to test these "modelling" environments that are 
> capable of doing rules, workflow and event procecssing.
>
> If you have the power of events book, you can pretty much pick any 
> advanced feature and we won't have it today, nore many commercial engines.
>
> Not sure if any Rete research is interested to students, as mostly 
> this is an engineering effort anyway. We have done partitioning, but 
> not parallel patching. There is more research in execution control, 
> but this is probably an engineering thing. Maybe distributed Rete, 
> where it takes the partitions and distributes them onto other JVMS, 
> with fault tolerance?
>
> I'm CC'ing kris and edson. Kris is our flow lead, who you already met 
> in Romania, he might have some research ideas related to 
> workflow/processes. Edson is our CEP lead, and he can add some other 
> interesting CEP research ideas, as well as add more comments on the above.
>
> I've also cc'd Alex and AdrianP, who I both know are very interested 
> in temporal reasoning research.
>
> Mark
>
>
>




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