Pressing Questions of the Information Age: 20 Jan 2005
RFID: Facts, Fiction, and Trends
Gaetano Borriello
UW Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Suggested Readings
Professor Borriello recommends the following readings:
"The Key to Automating Everything" by Roy Want in the January 2004 issue of Scientific American .
RFID Handbook, 2nd Edition "Fundamentals and Applications in Contactless Smart Cards and Identification" by Klaus Finkenzeller, Wiley and Sons, April, 2003.
Workshop report of the National Academies Press, December 2004, available at www.nap.edu
Rapporteur's Report
On January 20, 2005, Gaetano Borriello, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and founder of Intel Research Seattle, gave a talk entitled "RFID: Fact, Fiction, Trends" to approximately 45 faculty and student members of the UW community, from departments and schools including Law, Business, the Information School, Communication, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Sociology. The talk was the 2 nd presentation in the Winter/Spring 2005 "Pressing Questions of the Information Age," a series on the intersection of computer technology and society that draws on speakers from a wide array of disciplines to present to a similarly multidisciplinary audience. The series is presented by the Center for Internet Studies and the Digital Media Working Group, and sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Radio frequency ID (RFID) is tagging and tracking technology that relies on radio frequency signals to identify an object. RFID can include other information about the object in addition to the ID, such as where it is and where it's been.
Here are sample RFID tags:
What would you want to identify and why? RFID is beginning to be used in a wide variety of applications, Borriello noted. The tags have been in the popular press recently for their role in supply-chain tracking, telling us where supplies are and what state they are in. For example, you might put a tag on a package of chicken and that tag might indicate not only where the chicken has been, but whether it had ever been heated above an acceptable level in transit. Tags track livestock in the U.S. and children and their belongings in Japan (children aren't implanted with tags, but cats are...more on that coming up), and can be used to monitor luggage, library books (run a tag reader along a shelf and see if book has been misplaced there). They are implanted in pets: Vets can scan your cat and reveal its entire medical history. Homeland security could use them to track whether containers entering the U.S. have been tampered with; U.S. passports will include tags coded up with biometric data; and toll roads on the East Coast use them so regulars can zip through easy-pass lanes and get their credit cards charged for their passing.
Borriello ran through the technology of RFID: Tags, either active-which include their own power supply and have serious processing power-or passive-which rely on an external source, their "reader," for power and have limited processing capability-are read by a reader. The reader is connected to a network and communicates information from the tag to interested parties. Databases collect the data from each instance of a tag reading and log the time and place the reading took place. Applications allow users to browse these databases.
Some common perceptions about RFID today turn out to be misperceptions, Borriello noted, including, first, the notion that tags can be tracked anywhere. In fact, tags can only be read by readers within close proximity. Today, that proximity needs to be about 5 meters: In the future, it could be 10 to 20 meters. Another myth is that the tags can be used to index data about users. Actually, today, that data is contained in many databases under the control of many different people. Merging all that data into one database is a difficult problem but possible in principle.
Radio frequency ID technology will soon be ubiquitous, and we have only vague ideas of where this technology will take us. Borriello cautions that we do not understand what it will mean to have a society saturated with easily identifiable objects, where every object could be indexed into a world-wide database; where every object could have its own history and you could track an object over its entire lifetime and analyze trends in user habits.
Privacy ranks high on the list of concerns about a future filled with RFID: Can we architect systems that can safeguard privacy? Will we be able to manage the data generated by all the readers?
UW CSE is creating a microcosm of that future world, equipping the Allen Center building and its occupants with RFID readers and tags. Researchers hope to explore applications and their social implications for this technology while there is still time to learn and adapt it.
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