Two RFID Academic Events Planned for 2007

Dec. 5, 2006—The 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.