A group of delegates from various Korean RFID associations visited UW CSE today to learn about the RFID Ecosystem project, to discuss challenges, and to share findings on future scenarios for RFID use. We shared demonstrations, presentations, and experience over the course of the morning and found that we share many of the same challenges (e.g. uncertainty in sensor data, system scalability, user privacy). The 20 RFID experts represent Korea’s large and growing interest, investment, and innovation in RFID technology. Korea’s focus on RFID is driven forward by projects like New Songdo City, a planned “U-city” and international business center which will include many elements of ubiquitous computing infrastructure including, possibly, RFID readers deployed throughout the city. In this scenario, RFID would be used to promote recycling of tagged products as well as possibly for health care applications; whether the ubiquitous RFID deployment becomes reality or not, the $25 billion project will include a $297 million RFID research center when completed. After their visit the delegates continued on to the RFID World conference in Las Vegas.

Today’s talks covered a variety of topics, from effective and efficient strategies for managing RFID data in the supply chain, to a framework for security in interoperable RFID networks, to probabilistic RFID data cleaning and even RFID in mobile E-commerce.

One interesting talk on “Interoperable Internet Scale Security Framework for RFID Networks” was given by Tingting Mao at the MIT AUTO-ID lab. This work describes a framework whereby businesses can define policies for sharing EPC data and the associated business events. A key feature of this system is that it uses authentication and authorization based on an aggregation of business rules, enterprise information, and RFID tag information. In another talk, Antti Sirkka from TietoEnator discussed “Modelling Traceability in the Forestry Wood Supply Chain”. This work aims to use RFID to improve information on processes in the forestry wood production system – a pressing problem given the equivalent of Є5 billion of wood raw material going to waste in Europe.

There were also great talks and discussion from panelists Yanlei Diao (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Fusheng Wang (Siemens Corporate Research).

Slides from the talks will eventually be posted online at: http://rfid.cs.washington.edu/rfdm08/

The first annual International Workshop on RFID Data Management (RFDM’08) is happening in Cancun today in conjunction with the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners that work on problems related to managing data produced by RFID or other traceability and automated identification (Auto ID) technologies. The goal is to fill an important gap in the community by bringing interested researchers together to identify future research challenges and opportunities. The workshop is co-chaired by Prof. Magdalena Balazinska and Dr. Karin Murthy (IBM).

Prof. Jiawei Han (UIUC) just gave a great keynote talk titled “Warehousing and Mining Massive RFID Data Sets”. It covered some recent work he an his student Hector Gonzalez have done on techniques for managing the massive (i.e. peta-byte scale) RFID data sets that are generated by supply chain applications of RFID. He concluded with some interesting work that applies these techniques to the analysis and aggregation of traffic patterns using EZ-pass and FasTrak data.