[drools-research] research ideas

[Mark Proctor]

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Wulff wrote:
> Hello Mark,
>
> thanks for putting me on CC. Impresive what is ongoing.
> Just today I have announced to our master students our proposal 
> to introduce fuzzy logic into Drools as our master project. 
> Even if I am quiet at present due to heavy workload I have the 
> drools project still in the pipe. I hope that some
> of our students will volunteer within the project. As least I will start
> with the CERN people in spring 2009 using Drools for RMFL 
> (:= rule based monitoring with fuzzy logic).
>
> I hope the best for Davide and his ideas and 'm sad that at present
> I cannot comunicate with him as mutch as I want to. I am not absent
> but overloaded (hard to believe...)
>   
No problem, main thing is communication. If we all keep communicating, 
even if we can't act on it straight away, it helps for the future. That 
way if/when you do eventually hit the ground for uncertainty, you'll 
already have a lot of brackground so you aren't doing it blind. This is 
partly the aim of the Drools Research Network idea, just a low volume 
communication medium to help raise people's peripheral awareness, for 
people to discuss possible research ideas and status updates on their 
existing research.

Just a FYI  we are hoping to place Davide on an internship for 4 months 
at Newcastle University in partnership with Red Hat, also part of the 
Marco Polo scheme. If we can pull this off, it'll happen end of January, 
meaning he'll be able to work full time on this for a while.

Mark
> Greetings Niko
>
> Am Mittwoch, 12. November 2008 schrieb Mark Proctor:
>   
>> 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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