Learn from your elders

Mithu Bhattacharya is a fourth year Ph.D. student in IST and co-advised by Dr. Chao-Hsien Chu and Dr. Tracy Mullen. Dr. Chu is my advisor and Dr. Mullen has always been contributing and supportive for my research.

Mithu was advised by Dr. Mary Beth Rosson in her first year doing research in Human-Computer Interaction using quantitative research methodology. They had one paper¹ published in 2007. Then she did not feel so comfortable doing survey and thus redirected her research interest to RFID lab (www.net1.ist.psu.edu/rfid), during which she published two papers. One paper² deals with RFID implementation in retail industry and was published in the proceeding of Decision Science Institute (DSI) Conference. Mithu presented this paper in Phoenix, AZ in 2007. Another paper³, published in IEEE International Conference on RFID, uses content analysis methodology to do a comparative analysis of RFID adoption in retail and manufacturing sectors. She also presented this paper in Vegas, 2008. However, she doesn't come to our weekly meeting in RFID lab this semester, probably because she is very busy or wants to do so some other researches. I guess she will have dissertation proposal defense very soon.

Compared to Mithu, I am doing more technical stuff in RFID application. Interested in how to extract useful information from large volume of RFID data, I started to explore this issue half a year ago and got one paper for this topic accepted by DSI conference. This semester, the data mining course provides me much insight in how to extract useful information for application level usage. However, I believe with the increasing volume of information in future, the traditional database techniques including active database will be outdated because of their incapability to store and process data. New business intelligence techniques such as Complex Event Processing are emerging and will flood the market for real-time business intelligence.

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

2. 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.

3. 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.