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!

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.

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.