Director of MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory and a professor of Information Engineering

This talk will focus on the problems of bringing real time visibility to physical objects by using active and passive RFID. The use of RFID technology to track products through the supply chain was promoted by MIT’s Auto-ID Center and the concept of the 5 cent tag encouraged companies such as Wall*Mart and Gillette to spearhead RFID adoption. However, to be useful in a supply chain we need to be able to answer the questions of What (Identity), When (timestamp), Where (location) and Why (business context). Indeed, the problem extracting higher level (business) events from the voluminous data is a key issue, since even today 70% of the data in ERP systems is unused. The wide array of use cases in the various verticals (FMCG, HLS, Aero, Defense, Auto, Pharma) have raised many questions of how to build a global network in which objects can be tracked. The problems of Discovery and Track and Trace in the Pharma supply chain will be used to highlight some of the complexities that arise when data must be protected and when anti-counterfeiting measures such as e-Pedigree have been mandated by law, as in California and Florida. To understand in more depth security issues, pub-sub and caching, processing of streaming data, and event coordination, the Auto-ID Lab is building a simulator (based on the Robotics Studio CCR and DSS). A number of services will be demoed, such as an open source EPC Information Service (EPCIS) for tag query, a tag translation service for moving between the myriad ID standards in use in industry, and a GEO-EPC location service which are available at http://auitoid.mit.edu , http://epcis.mit.edu and http://epcis.mit.edu/GeoEPCVE . For fun and inspired by the Robotics Studio team and Brian Cross’s WiMo, we are also building robots to help shoppers and to track products in warehouses. A number of MS technologies are being used, such as LINQ, XNA, RS( CCR, DSS). WiMo, Virtual Earth, SharePoint and Info-Card.