My likely future publication/ presentation outlets

By ZANG LI on October 26, 2008 11:28 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
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.

Academic Communities

By ZANG LI on October 19, 2008 12:02 AM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

I 'd like to introduce several academic communities I am familiar with:ISR, IEEE RFID.

ISR stands for Information Systems Research, which is an an academic journal that publishes research papers in the areas of Information Systems and Technology.  ISR was established in in 1990 by the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and because of the high quality of its papers, ISR was recently selected as one of the top academic journals by BusinessWeek.  ISR describes itself as:
    "...a leading international journal of theory, research, and intellectual development, focused on information systems in organizations, institutions, the economy, and society."


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Source: http://www.ieee-rfid.org/2008/2008.php

IEEE refers to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It produces about 30% of the world's research literature in the electrical/electronics engineering and computer science fields, with over 100 peer-reviewed journals. It may be the biggest technical professional organization in the world.  IEEE RFID 2008 is an annual conference, which aims to address the technical and policy challenges in the areas of RFID (radio frequency identification). This conference mainly focuses on RFID technologies, RFID enabled large-scale distributed information systems, and RFID based applications.

 

The senior student - Mithu Bhattacharya

By ZANG LI on October 16, 2008 10:56 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Mithu Bhattacharya, the fourth year Ph.D student in IST, Penn State University, has worked in RFID lab more than one year. She is co-advised by Dr. Tracy Mullen and Dr. Chao-Hsien Chu, who is also my advisor. In this one year, she contributed a lot to RFID lab.

Her research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, RFID and supply chain. She is now focusing on the RFID adoption analysis in retail and manufacturing sectors. In her recent paper - "RFID Implementation in Retail Industry: Current Status, Issues, and Challenges", she proposed a framework for the benefits obtained from implementing RFID in the retail supply chains, and based on statistical analysis, she tried to prove that the benefits of RFID will vary from industry to industry based on their specific nature and requirements. Up until now, she has published three papers, which are listed as following:

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.

I am also working on RFID, and have gotten a lot of help from her. Before we came to RFID lab, there was only one Ph.D student there. She did lots of works there.

Several Important Points About Learning and Teaching

By ZANG LI on October 14, 2008 8:57 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Learning refers to the acquisition of different types of knowledge supported by perceived information. As Robert Leamnson said, "Learning is something that you do to yourself." This can be understood as, learning is a construction process of our knowledge base. Here, based on the concept map I designed, I would like to emphasize several points, which seems important in my end.

learning.jpg

Prior Knowledge: Importantly, Learning primarily proceeds from prior knowledge, and only secondarily from the presented materials. In order to determine students' prior knowledge on a topic, there are several assessment techniques can be used. The simplest one, which is adopted widely in various courses, is to ask students to give a brief explanation of one of the most important concepts (e.g., can be the core word of course's name) of the course, based on their prior understanding. For example, for the course named "Optimizing Supply Chain", the instructor or TA can ask student to give a definition of "Supply Chain". Suggested by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross, another two assessment techniques can be employed:
1.    Focused Listing: For an important topic, which is described by a word or brief phrase, the TA or instructor can ask students to write the most important points within a limited time. Using this data, the teacher can determine how student know the topic.
2.    Misconception/Preconception Check: For an important topic, create a simple questionnaire, which includes some of common misconceptions or preconceptions, to elicit information about students' ideas on this topic. Using this data, the teacher can determine how student know the topic.

Learning and Practice: Human learning has two components: understanding and remembering. Both of them are necessary and important for learning process. It is quite common that we can not remember something although we understood it some time ago. To keep what we understand in mind, we have to practice frequently to strengthen the "connections between brain cells".

Teamwork and Coaching: Based on some research reports, students who work in teams or collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their learning environment and easy to make a progress in knowledge construction, since the team members are more willing to provide support, encouragement and assistance in course requirements and assignments. It is important to note, coaching plays an important role for facilitating the teamwork. The guidance from instructor or TA helps to develop trust between team members, provide perspective, to encourage and to critique.


Reference:
Angelo, Thomas A., and K. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.

EPC Information Services for Supply Chain Optimization

By ZANG LI on October 14, 2008 2:20 PM | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks

EPC Information Services for Supply Chain Optimization

EPC Information Services is the most important part of the EPCglobal Network, which is a global information retrieval network aiming at providing RFID-associated data sharing across enterprises. By providing query interfaces, the EPC information services enable trade partners to obtain the real-time information of EPC-related objects within a business context.

In a decentralized supply chain, only the retailers can gain the demand information of customers. This will bring a growing variation upstream, leading to poor performance of the supply chain. By leveraging RFID and electronic product code, EPCglobal Network and EPC information services seek to relief these problems in two ways. First, by using the event-driven architecture and subscribe-notify model, the EPC information services will definitely shorten the operating time of information flow, reducing the lag of placing orders and checking stock out and so on. Secondly, information sharing and strategic partnerships can be developed based on authorization mechanisms provided by EPC information services. In this context, each authorized partner can make timely decisions on inventory, ordering, selling based on the information acquired from EPC information services, an in turn weaken the effect of amplification of demand variability.

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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