I was fortunate to present our work on the RFID Ecosystem at the EMC Innovation conference in Franklin, MA today.  The conference marks the second annual gathering of EMC Corporation’s Innovation Network, a worldwide collaboration of advanced technology researchers exploring a variety of areas such as service-oriented infrastructures, web 2.0 storage, information-centric security, virtualization and information grids.

Our friends at RSA Labs (the Security Division of EMC) invited a talk on the RFID Ecosystem as one of three talks in a session on academic research.  In my talk I presented an overview of the RFID Ecosystem project and then drilled-down to describe some key challenges for pervasive RFID data management (e.g., uncertainty, privacy) and how we address them with the Cascadia system (my talk is available here).  The talk went quite well and was followed by some great questions and discussion with a few of the more than 1,000 attendees.  After the talk I had a chance to meet with researchers from RSA as well as ERC, EMC’s new research center in Beijing, China.  I received a lot of great feedback from these very interesting groups – the conference was a fantastic experience overall!

We just returned from two weeks at the SIGMOD and MobiSys conferences where we presented demos of the RFID Ecosystem’s event detection infrastructure, Cascadia. Cascadia allows developers and end users to declaratively specify meaningful high-level events (e.g. “a nurse has entered patient X’s room with equipment Y”, “I leave the building without my car keys”) using a SQL-like sequence language or with an intuitive GUI called Scenic. Cascadia can then continuously extract these events over a stream of incoming, uncertain RFID data using probabilistic data management techniques. The Cascadia demos at SIGMOD and Mobisys illustrated Cascadia’s operation from end-user event specification, to event detection, to event notifications for one of two demo applications. The original demo proposals are available on our publications page; both demos are also entirely web-based and will be posted online sometime in the coming weeks.