Monday, June 20, 2011

Plato vs. Aristotle

Carole-Ann Matignon recent Blog posting was entitled:  "Plato or Aristotle", the two great Greek philosophers, that were once labeled as those in which the entire western culture is a footnote to their writings.   In this context, I guess that Carole-Ann meant the major difference in their outlook of life.  Plato saw the individual as part of a society, while his student Aristotle, saw the society as a collection of individuals.  The difference is -- who is in the middle: the society or the individual.    Carole-Ann's posting was in the issue of privacy, or data accumulated on people, which in some cases it is good for the society in general, a government agency, an ability to get credit decisions and more, but can harm the individual's interest.    This is an issue that is also dominant in dilemmas about event processing for years, the relatively ease in obtaining information about  events, in a world full of sensors and cameras, and the privacy considerations.


Security and privacy in event processing is one of the topics we'll discuss in the DEBS tutorial about non-functional properties of event processing in DEBS'11.  Stay tuned for me.



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