The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 113 - 3 February 2014
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In This Issue
Richard Soley on the IoT
Oil & Gas Process and Information Integration
Ethics in Computing
Special Events During Next OMG Meeting
Memory Storage for Big Data Analytics
Seen Recently
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OMG's Chairman on the "Internet of Things"
Richard Soley, Chairman and President of the Object Management Group (OMG) discusses the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in this video. He sees the recent purchase of Nest by Google as a sign that domestic applications of the IoT are going to be big business, but he also mentions applications to manufacturing, and the convergence with trends in managing mobile devices.
O&G Process and Information Integration
The Feb. 25-26 event in Houston, mentioned in the last issue of the KIT, now has a registration page on the Energistics Web site. The agenda includes presentations and brainstorming on Oil & Gas industry business cases, examples of model-based integration efforts in other industries (aerospace, telecommunications, automotive) and an interactive session to define a roadmap for future efforts. The event will repeat in Utrecht, Netherlands, on March 30-31. You may contact us for more details.
Ethics in Computing Webinar
The ACM hosted on January 23 a webinar by Don Gotterbarn, Director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute (SEERI), entitled "Computing Professionalism: Do Good and Avoid Evil... and Why It Is Complicated to Do That in Computing." The Twitter feedback was very critical. The speaker focused on issues of bad user experience (UX) leading to accidents, which are not what most of the audience would consider to be ethical issues. In the Twitter exchange that followed, Alex Barkan (@unbuffered), Alison Derbenwick (@derbenwick), Karla Carter (@professorkarla) and Claude Baudoin were rather incredulous that the ethics of developing spying software for the National Security Agency (NSA), as well as the ethics of whistleblowing, were not addressed at all, even though we know that the question was asked during the webinar (because we did). Professor Carter said she would come back to the issue, and there may be a Cutter Consortium paper in the making on this topic, so stay tuned!
See you in Reston?
During the next Object Management Group (OMG) technical meeting week in Reston, Va., outside of Washington DC, there will be special events of interest to wide audiences:

... and of course the regular meetings of the various task forces (full program and registration form here) throughout the week. 

Big Data Analytics... Right Now!
"Big Data Analytics" has replaced and expanded the concept of Business Intelligence (BI) but carries with it the assumption that this is a "batch" process, based on an offline copy of the data used for regular operations. Given that some of the decisions that organizations wish to make on the basis of the analysis are time-sensitive, it is no wonder that solutions for faster analysis are being pursued. MIT's BlueBDM storage system is being touted as a radical innovation, but SAP has been offering its HANA (High-performance ANalytics Appliance) product for a while. HANA is an in-memory database that can be used for many purposes, including BDA (see Issue 108 for more).
Seen Recently...

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

-- Prof.. Stephen Hawking, famous physicist

 

"The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'we've always done it this way'."

-- Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), computer

pioneer whose work led to the COBOL programming language