Talks for Japan

I will be making some company visits in the Tokyo area between Nov. 30 and Dec. 3 for the MIT Industrial Liaison Program. Two abstracts follow.

Besides my work at MIT, I am involved with two start-up companies as scientific advisor. Aggeos is based in the Southwestern part of the US and the second company is in Cambridge, MA, near MIT. I very much believe that technologies developed at MIT should be commercialized as a means of creating new business and creating jobs.

Special thanks to GS1 for funding Auto-ID Labs and the two groups of people backing the start-up companies.

It is never easy to create something new. However, with the support of GS1 and folks from the business world, I think we can create some special technologies and companies.

I. Update on Auto-ID Labs and the Field Intelligence Lab

The MIT Auto-ID Lab has just completed a two-year cycle of research funded by GS1. The accomplishments include applied research in using a passive RFID tag as a sensor for structural beam deflection, sensing of fluid levels in tanks, and determining temperature. As the technology is refined, additional applications are anticipated in photovoltaics, electrostatic sensing, and indirect methods of sensing chemicals and biological organisms.

Other accomplishments include the application of metamaterials to enhance the readability of passive RFID tags along with novel applications of RFID in robotics.

For the next two years, Auto-ID Labs will focus on a wide range of topics that go beyond RFID and serve the core mission of GS1. The research agenda has the following underlying theme developed by Prof. Sanjay Sarma and Edmund W. Schuster:

"The Convergence of different technologies, standards and devices will play a central role in the research activities of the Auto-ID labs for the next two years. Through discussions with industry and academic leaders it has become clear that the integration of different technical standards in the GS1 eco-system is an emerging issue of great interest. Users often find the number of technologies and standards available hard to comprehend and let alone to integrate into meaningful and productive systems. The question often becomes 'Could even more productivity arise from integrating various standards?'"

Specific future projects include the following:

Lead (MIT)

-- Convergence of Carrier, Reader and Infrastructure Technologies

-- Better RFID Performance with Meta-Materials

-- Active Tag & Sensor Integration in EPC Network

-- Towards 10-cent RFID Tag Based Sensors

-- Emerging Auto-ID Technologies

Supporting Role (MIT)

-- Vision, Intelligence and Directional Guidance: Mobile Consumer

-- Free and Open Source EPC Tools - Fosstrak

-- Using Trace Information in Supply Chain Analysis with a Focus on Sustainability and Food Safety

II. Machine Understandable Semantics

Since 2003, various groups within the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity have conducted research on methods to achieve machine understandable semantics, namely to rapidly integrate data from different sources and to connect data to mathematical models.

The result of the research was the development of the M Language along with several software licenses available through MIT.

This presentation will explore two particular applications of the M Language, specifically,

A. Enterprise Resource Planning: Connecting Mathematical Models to Data Using the Internet.

Commonly provided by ERP vendors, master production scheduling (MPS) systems often strive to meet the needs of a large user base while limiting software functionality. Subsequently, business process reengineering becomes the means for firms to adapt to the limited functionality of MPS software packages. This talk develops a flexible approach for MPS delivery as an alternative to packaged software. The paper examines the general case of an open system architecture to deliver a specific master scheduling model to end-users. The open system approach fulfills a goal to standardize and speed the process of modeling in practice by creating a supply network for mathematical models that is searchable across the Internet with precision. The value lies on quickly putting state-of-the-art modeling in the hands of many users with no local computer implementation other than downloading an Excel spreadsheet.

B. Internet Architecture for Bio-Productivity

Genetics will always take the primary role in efforts to raise productivity for modern agriculture. However with recent advances in computing, data can play an important supportive role. This talk puts forth an Internet‐based architecture for computation that enhances bio‐productivity. The approach includes machine understandable semantics to enable data interoperability and connections to mathematical models. At the prototype level, a practical application from the Florida citrus industry demonstrates the concept. In general, future agricultural systems will be Internet based thus reducing cost and increasing capability. Standards organizations are certain to play an important role in this development, which might continue for the next decade or longer.