Leading academic institutions have launched nine new research projects as a result of collaborative discussions held during the second RFID Academic Convocation, presented on May 1 in conjunction with RFID Journal LIVE! 2006. The projects cover RF interference and other technical, standards and business issues.
“The second convocation was a major step forward in bringing businesspeople, RFID vendors and academics together to address key issues end users are facing as they seek to deploy RFID technologies,” says Stephen Miles, a research scientist at the MIT Auto-ID Labs. “We’re harnessing all of the brain power of academia to work with end users and technology providers to solve real-world problems and move RFID forward.”
The nine RFID research projects, identified by attendees at the RFID Academic Convocation, are listed below, along with the researcher heading each project:
• Gap analysis of RF interferences in hospitals (Gisele Bennett, professor and director of the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech Research Institute)
• Test protocol for measuring the impact of RFID radiation on biologics stability (Alexander M. Klibanov, professor of chemistry and bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Characterizing UHF, HF and LF tag performance (Marlin Mickle, professor and director of the RFID Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburg)
• Examining the use cases for HF and LF EPC RFID systems in the health-care and life sciences industry (Steve Miles, MIT Auto-ID Labs)
• RFID telemetry interface based on IEEE 1451 (Tom Caine, executive director of the Swanson Institute of Technical Excellence, University of Pittsburg)
• RFID network and Web services (John Williams, director of the MIT Auto-ID Labs)
• RFID location interface based on IEEE 802.11g, as well as asset tracking in hospitals (Kaveh Pahlavan, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
• Business models for RFID adoption (Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas)
• Global food-chain visibility and cold-chain management (Jean-Pierre Emond, codirector of the IFAS Center for Food Distribution and Retailing at the University of Florida)
These projects are in addition to major research efforts already going on at the Auto-ID Labs, the University of Arkansas and other major academic institutions around the world. Such efforts include the Aero-ID program at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and anticounterfeiting research being done at the Auto-ID Labs St. Gallen.
“We’re proud to play a role in facilitating collaboration among academics, vendors and end users,” says Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal. “A lot of progress will be made over the next 12 months, and we’re looking forward to cohosting future Academic Convocations with MIT.”