The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 199 - 1 Sep 2017
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In This Issue
BPM Meets IoT
About the Popularity of Programming Languages
Elsevier Science Direct Access
Privacy and Data Protection Certifications
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Industrial Process Modeling: BPM Meets IoT
We ran into an interesting paradigm for the design of Industrial Internet of Things systems. Dallas-based XMPro, founded by Pieter van Schalkwyk in 2009, started in the business process management (BPM) domain, focusing on enterprise applications. As they added the ability to trigger activities on the basis of incoming events or data, this led them to address IoT systems, on which they are now focused. But their "Agile IoT application suite" retains a strong flavor of process modeling and orchestration, down to the graphical workflow notation used to model a system while minimizing the amount of code.
Programming Language Popularity -- Reader Feedback
One of our readers, Peter Coles, found several issues with our comments in the KIT No. 198 about the IEEE Spectrum 2017 ranking of the 10 most popular programming languages. His points are worth reporting here.

First, we were skeptical that Python was more prevalent than, say, C++ or C#. Peter wrote that "server-based systems that back websites and apps (Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.) all use Python. The others in this space are Ruby, JavaScript, Java and Go" -- and Peter feels Java's popularity is diminishing and Go is still playing catchup to the others. The primary bottleneck in these types of systems is I/O, so the relative speed of execution of different languages is rarely a key factor. He also mentioned that "much data science is done in Python with great libraries," and that it helps that it "sits on top of C" and can therefore invoke libraries of optimized C code.

Our statement that "Python is elegant and simple, therefore may be a favorite of educators as well as amateur programmers" sounded dismissive. Peter said that "often the highest ideal of great code is how elegant and simple it can be to perform powerful tasks." No issue there -- what we had meant to say was that simplicity sometimes comes at the expense of missing constructs required in the real world (memory access, I/O, exceptions, etc.), which was one of the big criticisms against Pascal and similar elegant languages in the 1970s.
Elsevier ScienceDirect Access for ACM Members
Elsevier is now providing members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with access to more than 1,200 online books, in PDF format, from its ScienceDirect platform. The categories in the Computer Science collection are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design, Computer Networks and Communications, Computer Science Applications, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Hardware and Architecture, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Systems Signal Processing, and Software.

ACM members should go to the ACM Learning Center page, log in, then click on the ScienceDIrect link to explore the collection.
Privacy and Data Protection Training
AIIM, a well-regarded society of professionals involved in information, document and knowledge management, has partnered with the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to offer 3 new ANSI-accredited certification training courses on privacy and data protection:
  • Certified Information Privacy Professional/U.S. (CIPP/US)
  • Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT)
  • Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM)

More details here 

Seen Recently...
"There are valid reasons to outsource IT services, systems and products. Outsourcing IT to improve the way a business works to serve its mission is not one of them. Outsourcing IT will not solve process and information problems."
-- Marc Gewertz, EiM Consultants LLC, initiating a discussion
in the Enterprise Architecture Network group on LinkedIn
"On a first date, you should always ask 'what was the name of your childhood pet?' in case it doesn't go well and you have to hack their email."
-- Anonymous quote that points out how people still tend to use
weak passwords or "security questions" after years of warning