CSCI 2950-T: Topics in Databases and Systems

Complex Event Processing
(a.k.a. How to cope with Events, Rules, Patterns and other complex things in life)

Description: Complex Event Processing (CEP) is increasingly used to make sense of data by its ability to easily express and efficiently identify sophisticated spatio-temporal event patterns. As such, CEP takes as input high-volume (and often streaming) data, identifies interesting bits and pieces and then "connects the dots", basically turning fuzzy raw data into information that can be acted upon. CEP has important applications in a large number of diverse domains including financial services (identifying market fluctuations for real-time automated trading), telecommunications (network intrusion detection), entertainment and gaming (cheat detection in MMORPGs), security (monitoring suspicious behavior in an airport), and web and e-business (real-time customer experience management over click-streams).

This course will study the basics and the state of the art in CEP with a  focus on data-centric applications. It will cover alternative CEP languages (event-, rule- and pattern-based), software tools (stream processing engines, rule engines and database management systems) and advanced techniques that draw from learning and probability theory. The course will primarily consist of technical readings and discussions. There will also be a project component where participants will build innovative CEP applications using publicly-available tools.