October 2008 Archives

Dr. Daniel W. Engels is the committee chair of IEEE RFID conference 2009.  He is an associate Professor in the UT Arlington Department of Electrical Engineering and is the founding director of the Texas Radio Frequency Innovation and Technology Center. The Texas Center is a multi-disciplinary, multi-university research initiative dedicated to bringing intelligence and communication capabilities to all objects by exploring the fundamental technologies of and the applications of radio frequency identification, wireless communication, and sensor network technologies and systems. The vision of the Texas Center is a world of interactive, socially responsible, and intelligent everyday objects and devices. The Center's primary research focuses on healthcare and security applications and social and policy issues exposed by the adoption of wireless communication technologies and intelligent objects.

Dr. Engels is the former Research Director of the Auto-ID Labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Engels spearheaded the Auto-ID Labs' transition from the Auto-ID Center to the Auto-ID Labs and EPCglobal, Inc., a non-profit organization. He is one of the principle architects of the EPC System, a system designed to connect physical objects to the Internet, and the principle product from the Auto-ID Center. The EPC System was licensed to EPCglobal Inc. in 2003. The EPC System is currently being adopted and deployed by the retail industry and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Dr. Engels was the first Chairman of the Hardware Action Group under EPCglobal, Inc. and was a member of EPCglobal's Technical Steering Committee (TSC) from its inception in 2003 until May 2005. The Hardware Action Group is the technical action group charged with developing the hardware standards, including radio frequency identification protocols, used within the EPC System. The TSC guides the work of all the technical action groups that develop EPCglobal's standards and recommends avenues of EPC System related research to the Auto-ID Labs.

Prior to his appointment as Research Director of the MIT Auto-ID Labs, Dr. Engels was the Director of Protocols for its predecessor, the Auto-ID Center. The Auto-ID Center, founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in October 1999, developed the EPC System and its related standards. As Director of Protocols, Dr. Engels led the development of two radio frequency identification (RFID) protocols, and he led the daily operational and research activities at the MIT Auto-ID Center. Dr. Engels is one of the original members of the team that formed in 1998 to develop what became known as the EPC System.

Dr. Engels has authored more than 30 articles published in peer reviewed conferences and journals.  His work includes seminal publications on the Reader Collision Problem, as well as articles on antenna design, the EPC System, VLSI computer aided design, theoretical complexity of scheduling problems, and programming languages.

Dr. Engels' broad research interests span the areas of radio frequency communications, sensor technologies, information systems, scheduling theory and applications, optimization algorithms, complexity theory, and the social and policy implications of technologies.  He is applying concepts from these areas to solve problems in embedded systems, mobile computing, electronic commerce, and applications of advanced and emerging technologies for security and in healthcare.

Dr. Engels received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his Master's of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Bachelor's of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude, from the University at Buffalo.

As a new Phd student, I think I may borrow some information from the senior students in my RFID lab. My possible future publication places conferences/journal include: Information Systems Research, The European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Operations Research, IEEE RFID and ACM.

Information Systems Research is a journal of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Information Systems Research is a leading international journal of theory, research, and intellectual development, focused on information systems in organizations, institutions, the economy, and society. ISR has been constantly improving the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) impact factor score and is considered on e of the best journal in IS community.

The European Journal of Information Systems provides a distinctive European perspective on the theory and practice of information systems for a global audience. This journal encourages first rate research articles by academics, but also case studies and reflective articles by practitioners. It provides a critical view on technology, development, implementation, strategy, management and policy. The impact factor for EJIS is pretty high, although not as decent as ISR. Recently, EJIS has a special issue for RFID - Managing RFID Projects in Organizations. The theme of the special issue will be to discover the challenges faced by organizations in execution of RFID projects. It will address every aspect of RFID project management starting from requirements analysis, to implementation, and maintenance. This is quite relevant to the research in our RFID lab.

Information Systems Frontiers examines new research and development at the interface of information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) from analytical, behavioral, and technological perspectives. It provides a common forum for both frontline industrial developments as well as pioneering academic research. The journal's multidisciplinary approach draws from such fields as computer science, telecommunications, operations research, economics, and cognitive sciences. Among the emerging areas covered are enterprise modeling and integration, object/web technologies, information economics, IT integrated manufacturing, medical informatics, digital libraries, mobile computing, and electronic commerce. Both the Editorial Advisory Group and the Editorial Board feature outstanding individuals from academia and industry, ensuring that all the multiple frontiers in the IS/IT field are covered.

Operations Research (OR) is the flagship journal for operations research community. I try to publish papers on the two fields: i) methods and principles on data based operational systems; ii) observations and modeling of operating systems. The operational systems in my end include tracking systems, SCM (supply chain managment) systems.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, IEEE RFID 2009 addresses key topics and issues related to RFID technologies, their supporting distributed information systems and their applications. I got a paper accepted in IEEE RFID 2008. IEEE RFID 2009 is the third annual one. For the areas it features, I am interested in the followings: i) RFID Communication Protocols, including Coding, modulation and medium access schemes; ii) RFID Location Sensing, including novel system approaches, technologies and algorithms; iii) RFID security and privacy, including cryptographic protocols and privacy-enhancing techniques. The deadline of RFID 2009 is December 5, 2008, and the conference will be held in Orlando this year.

ACM SIGKDD: SIGKDD is the famous conference in knowledge discovery and data mining. I hope I can come out some papers on the two aspects on data mining: i) RFID data processing; ii) Optimizing supply chain using data mining technologies.

There is a senior student in my lab, Mithu Bhattacharya. She is a forth year student. Right now she is co-advised by Prof. Chao-Hsien Chu and Prof. Tracy Mullen, and she is doing her dissertation -- RFID implementation issue in consumer packaged  goods and pharmaceutical value chain.

During her Phd study, she has published some papers.

Mary Beth Rosson, Hansa Sinha, Mithu Bhattacharya, Dejin Zhao: Design Planning in End-User Web Development. VL/HCC 2007: 189-196.

Mithu Bhattacharya, Chao-Hsien Chu, Tracy Mullen. RFID Implementation in Retail Industry: Current Status, Issues, and Challenges, Decision Science Institute (DSI) Conference, Phoenix AZ, 2007.

Mithu Bhattacharya, Chao-Hsien Chu, Tracy Mullen. A Comparative Analysis of RFID Adoption in Retail and Manufacturing Sectors. 2008 IEEE International Conference on RFID, Volume 16, Issue 17, April 2008 Page(s):241 - 249.

Thus, she has already attended some conference, which are Decision Science Institute (DSI) Conference and IEEE International Conference on RFID.

Compare with her, the senior Phd student who has decided the research direction, I am a new graduate student who just join IST and RFID lab. So, I am still seeking my research direction. At present, I am interested in supply chain and RFID integration issues. But we still need to see  ..... Hopefully I will settle my research areas soon.

As I talked last time. Before Prof. Chu came to the US, he was awarded an MBA from Tatung University (Taiwan), and a B.E. in Industrial Engineering from Chung Yuan University (Taiwan). In 1980, he came here for his Ph.d study. After 4 years , he received his Ph.D. in Business Administration (major in Operations Management and Information Systems) from The Pennsylvania State University.

He had a lot of working experience, both in academe and industry. He was on the business faculties at Iowa State University, Baruch College and the Tatung University, and was in 1991/1992 a Visiting Associate Professor of Management Sciences at the University of Tsukuba (Japan). He is Adjunct Professor of Management and Engineering at the Hebei University of Technology (China), where he is serving as the Chief Academic Advisor to the School of Management. His industrial experience includes serving as a project leader, section chief, and consultant at Tatung Company - a multinational company with headquarters in Taipei and also in providing consulting services to a number of companies in China, Taiwan, and North America.

According to the public record, my advisor attend many different journls and conferences. For example, International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation, Journal of New Mathematics and Natural Computation, European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Security and Networks, International Journal of Production Research, Ad Hoc Networks Journal, Electronic Commerce Research Journal, Journal of Management and Information, etc. And for conferences, International Conference on Telecommunication Systems - Modeling and Analysis, Pacific Asian Conference of Information Systems, International Conference on Information Warfare and Security, and the most often conferences he attend should be IEEE related conferences.

In past few years, Prof. Chu taught some courses, which include SRA 111 - Introduction to Security and Risk Analysis, SRA 221 - Overview of Information Security, IST 220 - Networking and Telecommunications, IST 302 - IT Project Management, IST 321 - Information Technology and Systems Integration, IST 420 - Fundamentals of Systems and Enterprise Integration, IST 402 - Wireless Network Design and Security, IST 421 - Information Technology and Systems Integration II, IST 450 - Information Systems Security, IST 451 - Network Security, IST 454 - Computer and Cyber Forensics, IST 456 - Security and Risk Management, IST 497 - Mobile Information Services: Design and Implementation, and IST 501 - Integrative Theories and Methods of the Information Sciences and Technology.