What drives me here?

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.