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Dozens of volunteers from the University of Washington (UW) will participate in a radio frequency identification (RFID) project that tags hundreds of personal items in what organizers call "the next step in social networking." The goal: determine if any applications are useful enough to justify the potential loss of privacy.
Designed and spearheaded by University of Washington student Evan Welbourne, the graduate thesis aims to explore the use of RFID tags in a social environment. The project, nearly two years in the making, resides under the guidance of Magda Balazinska and Gaetano Borriello, both Welbourne's graduate advisors and UW professors of computer science and engineering.
Early in March, researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from 400 people who regularly use the building. The people and objects will create a radio frequency network of information. The trial will run four months.
Students, engineers and staff will wear RFID tags on clothing, backpacks and other belongings to identify their location every second. About 90 readers, four antennas on each, have been secured to install on campus throughout much of UW's six-story computer science and engineering building named after Paul Allen.
Researchers steered clear of placing RFID readers near bathrooms or eating areas to respect participants' privacy. The readers will collect and transmit tag information into a database. Data also will publish to several Web pages, including Google Calendar.
Researchers have been testing the system on themselves. A dozen members of the group have worn the tags on their necks and placed them on certain belongings during the past year.
The team built the software infrastructure from scratch. The system uses SQL, and Apache Tomcat Web Server. The code is written in Java. The 20-cent tags transmit on the EPCglobal Gen 2 protocol. Welbourne estimates the group will need between 300 and 500 RFID tag to complete the pilot.
The readers can scan the tags from up to 30 feet away. The signal, which the readers can detect up to 30 feet away, identifies the item, to whom it belongs, and when it was last seen.
"The readers tranmist information about once per second, per tag, per person, and we do some compression on the fly," he says. "In the last 18 months we have had about a dozen researchers wearing the tags casually around the building. The deployment has been turned on and off, but during that time we have collected millions of tag events."
The project will examine several privacy concerns. Among them are malicious attacks, friend or co-worker accessing the data without prior consent, and who owns the data when a company collects the information on the person.
Welbourne says the system doesn't collect a ton of information. A few queries indicate 10 people from the research group generated about 2GB of raw RFID data per month during periods when the system was fully operational. The system also uses a particle filter to smooth the raw data and maintain a probability distribution over the location of a tag, even when the tag is not in the vicinity of a reader.
Those participating in the trial can control who sees the data and can delete any information, or opt out of the study at any time, with no explanation required. But separating and discarding the data has been challenging. "Event detection is a key challenge to the research," Welbourne says.
The system also incorporates two new tools. The first records a person's movements in Google Calendar. "If you have a log of events and meeting that have happened during the past month you can build queries, such as desktop search indexed by landmarks in time," he says. If I want to look up a Web page and can't remember the name, I could ask my personal digital store to locate the page. You may not remember the specific digital files, but could remember the physical space."
Participants can set the system to publish activities instantly on their Web calendar, such as arrival at work, meetings or lunch breaks. The second tool, dubbed RFIDder, pronounced "fritter," sends instant alerts to a friend's e-mail addresses or cell phones telling them when they are in specific places within the building. Each person can specify who can see their data, and change the settings or turn it off at any time. The system links to Twitter, an online blog that lets people post their whereabouts online.
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