September 2008 Archives

About Dr. Chao-Hsien Chu

By ZANG LI on September 27, 2008 2:29 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
About Dr. Chao-Hsien Chu
My adviser, Dr. Chao-Hsien Chu, is a Professor of IST college, the founding Executive Director of the Center of Information Assurance, at The Penn State University.
 
Before I came here, I knew him and his lab via his homepage. He was born in Taiwan and got an MBA degree from Tatung university and a B.E. from Chung Yuan University. He started his Ph.D study in 1980 focusing on Operations Management and Information Systems at Penn State. As one of the five founding faculty members of IST, Dr.Chu contributed a lot for IST, including developing the Information Assurance Track and the new Security and Risk Analysis major, setting up the RFID lab and Mobile Computer Lab and so on.

Dr.Chu is a very nice person. In the first year, he generously taught me many research methods and theories, and discussed every details with me during my research progress. With his help, I gradually identified my research interest direction and made some achievements. Not only did he teach me a lot in studying and research, but he cares about his students' lives. This summer, I tried to buy a used car. He helped me to search cars and offered a lot of suggestions. After I got a car, he taught me how to drive and maintain the car.

Dr.Chu leads a happy life with his wife in state college. He has two daughters. Both of them are very clever. The older one has gotten a B.E. in EE of MIT and the younger one is now studying in music department of JHU.

i-School Analysis

By ZANG LI on September 12, 2008 9:54 PM | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
    Information schools have the primary goal of helping prepare professionals who not only understand technology, but also how people interact with technology, and how to apply and integrate it into any system. Trained in theory, behavioral foundations and applications, I-School people examine the interrelationships among people, information, and technology. This is characterized by a commitment to learning and understanding the role of information in human endeavors. The I-Schools take it as given that expertise in all forms of information is required for progress in science, business, education, and culture. This expertise must include understanding of the uses and users of information, as well as information technologies and their applications.   
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    Next follows the analysis from the perspectives of research and student training. From the angle of research, IST scholars focus their research on the interrelationships among people, technology, and information. Projects range from solving the technical problems of security to developing tools to better store, retrieve, and use information; from investigating how technology affects the workplace to determining how IT can foster community networks that address health care, education, and public policy. From the angle of training, IST help students gain a formidable array of skills and knowledge and want to make sure they understand the linkage between the creators of technology in any organization and the users of those technologies. The IST programs also are individualized, with students designing a mix of courses based on their research interests.

    Finally, we should note that IST studies IT problems and issues from multiple disciplines such as information systems, sociology, computer science and engineering, and psychology. They are complex problems and challenging issues and IST tries to resolve them using integrative research theories and methodologies, which are developed from the theories of other areas. On the other hand, because multidisciplinary research can open up new issues and provide new ways of thinking about issues, IST can have a great impact on science, practice, and education. Empirical observations have told us, many of today's challenges - health care, aging, digital inequality, knowledge management, systems integration, and design of complex computing environments - can best be solved with a multidisciplinary approach. 

A Fast Overview of RFID Network Architecture

By ZANG LI on September 8, 2008 12:41 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
    The EPCglobal Network is a global information retrieval network, which aims at providing standard-based services for trading partners to discover RFID-associated information. The EPCglobal framework consists of ID System for readers and tags, EPC (Electronic Product Code) middleware, Object Naming Service (ONS), the EPC Information Services (EPC-IS), and the Discovery Service. Each component plays a unique and important role in enabling the tracking objects and sharing of detailed, real-time product information. The architecture is depicted as following.


UPC to EPC, Product-level Data to Item-level Data

By ZANG LI on September 8, 2008 12:40 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
UPC to EPC, Product-level Data to Item-level Data
    The Universal Product Code (UPC) in a bar code represents a product to identify the type and brand of product; whereas under the EPC Network plan, the 64- or 96-bit EPC includes four fields that record the version, the manufacturer, product type and a serial number unique to the item. As a result, every product item may have its own identity and the so-called "Item-level" information. The "Product-level" information including the name, EPC and manufacturer, the value of EPC, production date and quality of each item are associated with the "Item-level" data.

Securing EPC related data ?
    There are at least two challenges to define authorization policies for this relationship. First, we may separately define the authorization polices for product- and item-level data. For example, the retailer accountant only needs to access the product-level data and is not allowed to know the item-level data. Secondly, regardless of the different values, some "item-level" attributes of the items with the same product type has the same structures, and then they may be assigned to the same authorization policies. For example, customers may not allow to know the quality of any product item. In this case, it is inefficient to simply issue access rights to each item. The administrator may need to specify a policy for the item-level attributes for all the items.

Who am I personally ?

By ZANG LI on September 8, 2008 12:39 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Zang Li


Heada.jpg    I am a graduate student in College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University .I started my Ph.D study in Penn State from August, 2007. Prior to this, I spent one years in China Mobile Communication Co., Ltd working on technology planning issues. I got a Master degree of computer sciences in Peking University and a Bachelor degree of material sciences in University of Sciences Technology Beijing.
    I like reading books, playing basketball, watching movies, listening to music, and wasting time on computer.

Who am I academically

By ZANG LI on September 8, 2008 12:38 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

    My research interests and passion has been on designing, building and analyzing networked systems, applications and services based on wireless technologies including radio information identification (RFID), Wi-Fi and Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) / Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) / Third Generation of mobile phone standards and technology (3G). In the past fives years, I have studied and worked at the Microprocessor R&D Center (MPRC) of Peking University, China; Bell Labs Research China (BLRC); China Mobile Communications Corporation Guangdong (GMCC) and the RFID Labs of IST, Penn State. The research topics I have been interested in and involved include Voice over IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) / IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), mobile softswitch, RFID information systems/networks, wireless positioning technology (RFID/Wi-Fi positioning technology, Mobile-positioning system), location-based services and mobile video services.

gears.gif    My current research focuses on wireless location tracking system and services, RFID technology, pervasive computing, and location-based services (LBS). In the last September, I started my research work at the RFID lab of IST. The first research topic is centered on RFID-enabled location tracking system . We designed a location-based communication system, which integrates RFID, wireless 802.11 and other pervasive technologies into existing communication systems by adopting SIP as the main control protocol. We used a four-layer model to describe the system architecture.  Besides, since most RFID tags and readers have limited capabilities in data computing and SIP communications, we introduced a location-oriented RFID middleware to solve the resource constraint problem. To realize the location information services, we analyzed the ontology entities in the system and designed semantic integration rules for the location engine.  The whole system employs the SIP event notification model to support the PUSH and PULL operations needed by most LBS.
   
    I am currently working on an access control model for pervasive systems especially RFID information systems. We investigate the data characteristics of these systems and tackle challenges of access authorization from five aspects: item-level and product-level, aggregation and disaggregation, containment relationship, sub-concept and union, and attribute authorizations. For each challenge, we design a solution based on dynamic authorization rules. Besides, how to integrate the model into existing systems is also being considered.

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