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!

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.