New Scientist had an interesting article on “trusting your gut” (and previously on “gut feelings”). Both articles indicate that humans are subconciously processing input information (events) that influence our concious decision making. I liked the examples of the radar technician subconciously recognizing a slight signal difference (an abstract event identification) as well as the firefighter avoiding death by analyzing his situation (an analytical response).
This is similar to why “situational awareness”, as provided by event-driven CEP sytems, is very useful in automated business decisions too…
Hi David: I’m pretty sure “gut feeling” is something different from CEP too… however, maybe “gut feeling” relates to compiled knowledge or implicit reasoning, based on prior events and knowledge assimilation. The later is, I think, the connection to CEP… as well as the idea of expert systems.
Cheers
Paul, nice discovery! However, it has relatively little to do with CEP. It is much more about the functioning of the subconscious mind in making decisions about the event input, and mainly in real time decision making.
I suppose you could view this as the abstraction function in CEP, where you are making an abstract event leading to an action from the input using the subconscious mind.
But the main lesson of this book seems to be “if you want to make the best decision in a tight real time situation, practice!”
Sully Sullenberger had 20,000 hrs of flight time, and thought a lot about safety issues.
Hi Tim:
The “Event Driven CEP Systems”, as you call them, do not provide much situational awareness.
So you concede they provide some situational awareness?
What software tools do you think provide more situational awareness than Complex Event Processing tools? BI reporting tools? Databases?
On BusinessEvents not doing “reasoning”… there is general agreement (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference) that inference tools do reasoning, and BE includes an inference engine. Ergo, BE is a kind of reasoning tool. Interestingly, orchestration is only implicit in rule- and state-driven reasoning, and scheduling is something else entirely.
[Note: the trackback comment points to a blog post by Tim that includes the misquote
[A] firefighter avoiding death by analyzing his situation …. is provided by event-driven CEP systems..
In case it is unclear to any other readers, the 2nd paragraph in my blog entry refers to the title: i.e.
Gut-feeling….This is similar to why “situational awareness”, as provided by event-driven CEP sytems, is very useful in automated business decisions too….
But thankyou for the Wikipedia link in your post. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_awareness includes Endsley’s model of situation awareness that is almost an ideal reference for CEP…]
Cheers!
Hi Paul,
The “Event Driven CEP Systems”, as you call them, do not provide much situational awareness.
Situational awareness is a complex concept that cannot be accomplished by any of the “CEP” software on the market today.
BusinessEvents is not a reasoning tool, it is more suited for orchestration and scheduling, not reasoning.
Yours sincerely, Tim