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!

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.