We’re happy to announce that three new students will be joining us this summer.  All three are outstanding students that have been selected and sponsored by organizations that strongly support undergraduate research.  One student is sponsored by Intel’s Research Program for Undergraduates (Intel REU), a program that “connects faculty to outstanding students who will assist in research and become an integral part of the research team”.  The other two students are sponsored by the Computing Research Association Women’s Distributed Mentor Program (CRA-W DMP), a “highly selective program that matches promising undergraduate women and underrepresented groups with a faculty mentor for a summer research experience”.
All three students will be working on RFID Ecosystem related projects with Prof. Balazinska and myself for 40 hrs/week this summer.  Leilani Battle (Intel REU) is a UW CSE student and will be working on algorithms to extract meaningful places from the probabilistic RFID location traces produced by Cascadia.  Kayla Eucken (CRA-W DMP) is a CS student at Western Oregon University and will be implementing a web-based notifier application that allows users to receive email and SMS notifications when Cascadia detects a particular RFID event (e.g., “I leave the building without my car keys”).  Kyle Rector (CRA-W DMP) is an EECS student at Oregon State University and will be investigating the use of Cascadia’s RFID events (e.g., group meetings, social events) as landmarks in desktop search with Google Desktop.  Kayla and Kyle will be maintaining project web sites hosted by CRA-W throughout the summer: Kayla’s page, Kyle’s page.  Kayla is also maintaining a project blog at UW CSE. ]]> http://rfid.cs.washington.edu/blog/2008/06/29/summer-students-join-rfid-ecosystem-project-full-time/feed/ 0 http://rfid.cs.washington.edu/blog/2008/06/27/electromagnetic-interference-limits-rfid-deployments-in-hospitals/ http://rfid.cs.washington.edu/blog/2008/06/27/electromagnetic-interference-limits-rfid-deployments-in-hospitals/#comments Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:18:45 +0000 Evan Welbourne http://rfid.cs.washington.edu/blog/?p=14

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a report on Wednesday that showed certain RFID systems may induce hazardous incidents in nearby critical care medical equipment.  The study examined the effects of a 128 kHz active RFID system and a 868 MHz passive RFID system on 41 different types of medical devices.  Out of 123 tests, 34 led to electromagnetic interference incidents, 22 of which were classified as hazardous, 2 as significant, and 10 as light.

Though many consider the result of this study to be a serious and shocking failure in engineering, some RFID vendors claim that the problem could be avoided by lowering the power output of the RFID readers.  In any case, this study highlights a key obstacle for pervasive RFID systems: it will probably not be possible to deploy RFID readers in all locations of interest due to a variety of issues including electromagnetic interference, budgetary issues, or aesthetic concerns.  As such, a successful RFID system will have to infer when a tag enters a location which is not covered by an RFID reader.  This is one of the challenges which we designed Cascadia, the RFID Ecosystem’s event detection middleware, to address.  In particular, Cascadia allows an admin to define a graph that describes locations of interest (which may or may not be covered by an RFID reader – see image below).  Cascadia then tracks tags over this graph and can infer with some probability when a tag enters a location that is not covered by an RFID reader.  See our MobiSys 2008 paper for details!

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.