"Wireless Internet of Artifacts" by Prof. Rajit Gadh, PhD, Director, UCLA Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise.

Date	Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Time	15:00 hrs
Venue	EE Seminar Hall, EE Department IIT, Mumbai

Abstract:

The last twenty-five years have marked the coming of the personal computing and communication industry. Result: Individuals now carrying devices that are personal, mobile and always connected to the Internet. It is my belief that in the next twenty-five years, such information carrying and disseminating capability will extend from the "computing/communication devices" to real-world non-computing artifacts that we use in every day life such as clothes, utensils, furniture, packages, etc. These artifacts will collectively form what I refer to as the "Internet of Artifacts", an idea whose time has come. Like with any grand challenge, these artifacts will need to be uniquely identified (using technologies such as RFID), they will need to communicate with each other (wirelessly) and will gradually have the ability to take intelligent decisions first individually and then collectively.

At UCLA's WINMEC (Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium), the Wireless "Internet of Artifacts" notion is being explored via a project called WinRFID (http://winmec.ucla.edu/rfid) -- which is the first generation of our implementation of this idea. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that can embody the identity and other related information of an artifact within a chip called a tag that has no power source and make such information available to an RFID transceiver when the tag receives the RF transmission and its coupled energy. RFID tags are expected to eventually be embedded into every daily-life artifact. At UCLA, we are developing the WinRFID Middleware that allows efficient, intelligent and optimized networking and management of RFID readers, tags and sensors at the edge of the network.

The WinRFID middleware is currently being used for several research and industrial-led projects at UCLA-WINMEC that include securing assets, asset tracking, managing object shipments in supply chains, factory wireless networks, etc.

The lecture will delve into the notion of the Wireless "Internet of Artifacts" and will present some of the real-world projects resulting from this research that's built up WinRFID.

About the Speaker:
Rajit Gadh, PhD
Professor, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
Director, UCLA Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium
Director UCLA Wireless Media Lab

Dr. Rajit Gadh is a Professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA where he heads the Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium of which major companies including Intel, HP, Sun, Siemens, Oracle, Computer Associates, Northrop Grumman, Hughes Network Systems, Qualcomm, TCS, Satyam, ISMB-Italy and several others are sponsoring members. Dr. Gadh works in the areas of Mobile/Wireless Internet, multimedia/graphics, RFID Middleware and scalability, RFID-sensor architecture, wireless enterprise security, multi-media and DRM for content distribution over the internet, and multi-media over UWB, within the Wireless Media Lab. He has over 100 papers in journals, conferences and technical magazines and 3 patents.

He has a Doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters from Cornell University and a Bachelors' from IIT Kanpur. He has taught as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, has been an Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his sabbatical as a visiting researcher at Stanford University for a year. Prior to his academic career, he has worked for two software startup companies. He has won several awards from NSF (CAREER award, Research Initiation Award, NSF-Lucent Industry Ecology Award, GOAL-I award), SAE (Ralph Teetor award), ASME (Kodak Best Technical Paper award), AT&T (Industrial ecology fellow award), Engineering Education Foundation (Research Initiation Award), etc., and other accolades in his career.