August 2008 Archives

Before I came to IST, I had no idea what I-School is. What attracted me was the I-T-P triangle with three sides: information, technology and people. With my background in software engineering, I had played a lot of technological stuffs but still had no sense of how information, technology and people interplay and interact with each other. The paradigm shift from traditional disciplines such as computer science and management school to interdisciplinary study in I-Schools will become the trend in this information era. This is the first reason driving me here.

Secondly, I had a particular interest in RFID technology. It is said to be the next generation for barcode and holds the promise of revolutionizing supply chain management and other industries. Following this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVmD4iTXRLE, you can find the benefits delivered by RFID (e.g. increase visibility, reduce storage shrinkage and improve business process, etc.) as well as its implementation challenges (e.g. privacy concerns). RFID technology can fit well into I-T-P paradigm and a lot of studies have been looking into issues lying in three sides. For example, the adoption of RFID is far behind early expectation although it is believed to bring business value for industries. In order to address RFID adoption issue, we need to investigate information and people sides. Another challenge is that the large amount of data produced by RFID technology does not provide meaningful information for business. Efficient technologies to extract meaningful information from raw data are badly needed. For my Ph.D. study, I would like to explore these research issues in RFID adoption and implementation in a large variety of applications.

I have been a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University advised by Prof. Chao-Hsien Chu since August 2007. I am currently working in RFID lab, which was established on October 2006 by a seed funding support from the National Security Agency and Department of Defense. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has recently burst forth as one of the emerging technologies for asset tracking, inventory management and supply chain management, etc. My current research interests are data mining, knowledge management and business intelligence in RFID applications, especially in healthcare sectors and supply chain management domain. Besides, I am also interested in RFID adoption and diffusion in healthcare and supply chain industry using quantitative research methodology.

Prior to this, I received her Bacholar's degree from the School of Software Engineering in Tongji University in July, 2007, Shanghai, China.

I have been TA for SRA111 (Security and Risk Analysis) with Dr. Gerry Santoro in Fall 2007, SRA111 with Dr. Anna in Spring 2007 and SRA311 with Dr. William McGill in Fall 2008, in College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University.

Following are some research papers published during my first year in IST and I will continue to explore in this area.

• Yao, W., Chu, C. H., Li, Z. and Mullen, T. (2008), "Leveraging Complex Event Processing for RFID Applications: A Case Study in Hospitals," National Conference of Decision Sciences Institute, November 2008, Baltimore, MD.
• Li, Z., Chu, C. H. and Yao, W. (2008), "A Policy-based Access Control Mechanism for RFID Information Services ," National Conference of Decision Sciences Institute, November 2008, Baltimore, MD.
• Li, Z., Chu, C. H. and Yao, W. (2008), "SIP-RLTS: An RFID Location Tracking System Based on SIP," IEEE International Conference on RFID, April 2008, Las Vegas, NV., pp. 173-182.

My name is Wen Yao, in Chinese姚雯. Compared to the southeast of China where I come from, I like living here in State College as it's quite, easy and comfortable. The worst thing here is that there is no place to go shopping and life is a little bit boring. Say the hobbies, I like play badminton and ping-pong in my spare time and get started to learn tennis lately. Besides, I like travelling a lot! If you want to know more about me personally, add me in Facebook, a good place for social networking.