Dec 05, 2006The cochairs of the RFID Academic Convocation conference—Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, and John Williams and Steve Miles, both of the Auto-ID Labs at MIT—today announced two upcoming research activities: the fourth and fifth RFID Academic Convocations.
The fourth convocation will be held in Europe as part of the program of the 2007 EU RFID Forum, to be hosted by the European Commission Directorate-General Information Society and Media in Brussels, Belgium, on March 13-14, 2007. The fifth RFID Academic Convocation will take place in the United States, hosted by RFID Journal LIVE! 2007 on April 30 in Orlando, Fla.
These two events follow a highly successful third RFID Academic Convocation in Shanghai last October. That convocation was organized by Zhang Zhiwen, director of the Department of High-Tech Development & Industrialization within the China Ministry of Science and Technology, and Yu Liu of the RFID Labs at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in conjunction with the first China International RFID Technology Development Conference & Exposition.
The RFID Academic Convocations, cohosted by the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, are led by conference committees consisting of RFID research directors responsible for the academic integrity of the convocation proceedings. The events are unique opportunities to follow the research happening around the world, and to participate in the process of road-mapping future research projects.
The convocations' objectives are to identify specific industry issues requiring a coordinated research response, define the underlying core technology research areas necessary to address these issues and continue the technology road-mapping process.
An estimated 300 people, including top academics, industry leaders, representatives of relevant user associations and organizations, and government officials, are expected to attend the 2007 EU RFID Forum. The event is being organized by the members of the EU projects BRIDGE and PROMISE, in cooperation with the Ambient Intelligence Technologies for the Product Lifecycle (AITPL) Cluster. This conference will concentrate on the identification of research needs with respect to different application areas, acting as a platform for continuing the dialogue with RFID stakeholders on a European level.
"The 2007 EU RFID Forum will bring together European Commission authorities, European and global university research centers, standard bodies and key end users," says Henri Barthel, technical director of GS1 Europe and chair of the European event's organizing committee. "The two main objectives of the event will be to contribute to building the long-term vision of ubiquitous computing, and to coordinate the programs of an ever-growing number of researchers around the world."
Among the topics the fourth RFID Academic Convocation will address, organized within the framework of the 2007 EU RFID Forum, are:
• New applications for secure RFID systems
• Privacy-enhancing techniques for RFID
• Ubiquitous product life-cycle management (PLM)
Requests for more information on this event may be e-mailed to
henri.barthel@gs1.org or
sylvie.woelffle@ec.europa.eu.
"We are encouraging participation by qualified academic and industry researchers and governmental agency representatives," says Steve Miles, a researcher at the Auto-ID Labs at MIT and a member of the event's organizing committee. Speakers will be able to attend RFID Journal LIVE!, which runs from April 30 to May 2, free of charge. Qualified academics interested in attending both the RFID Academic Convocation and RFID Journal LIVE! can do so for a discounted fee.
Among the topics the fifth RFID Academic Convocation will address, as part of RFID Journal LIVE! 2007's agenda, are:
• RFID implementation trade-offs for health care and life sciences
• EPC networking
• Support for international supply chains.
Tom Cain, a professor of electrical, computer and telecommunications engineering at the University of Pittsburg, will lead the health-care and life-sciences program, focusing on how to reconcile choices between HF and UHF RFID technologies, and how to ensure 100 percent readability for electronic pedigree applications.
John Williams, director of research at the Auto ID Labs at MIT, will lead an EPC networking session. "The open-source EPC Information Service (EPCIS) initiative led by the Auto-ID Labs at MIT brings together a set of reference code, test tools and documentation to support the release of the EPCIS standard for describing things in the world," Williams says. "The EPCIS specification, which is more than 100 pages long, was constructed with input from multiple industries and hundreds of end-user companies in the EPCglobal standardization process in the course of several years. The MIT code base is designed to help companies familiarize themselves with the data-exchange approaches based on EPCIS standards, and to open opportunities for rich business intelligence analytics based on these new sources of data."
Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, will lead a session on support for international supply chains. "The past three convocations have proven to be a good avenue for fostering some important collaborate efforts," Hardgrave says. "As a result, we have seen great projects among universities, and with private industry. However, we have much room for growth and improvement. Our vision is to use the continuing series of convocations to bring together the various parties, from across the globe, to work collaboratively on large-scale problems. We must find a way to address the big problems and find the commensurate funding sources."
Both academic events are part of a series of RFID Academic Convocations, driven by the Auto-ID Labs and organized around the world to build collaboration across academic disciplines, as well as institutional and geographic boundaries. These convocations concentrate on issues involving implementation and policy, providing participants with the latest strategies for RFID technical development and concrete pilots. Research directors and RFID project leads from academic research institutions addressing RFID requirements in Europe are invited to submit papers via e-mail to
rfidconvocation@mit.edu.
