This book is addressed to business management and project managers as well as researchers who are evaluating the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) for tracking uniquely identified objects. In an effort to make RFID project management less of an art form and more of a science RFID Technology and Applications brings together pioneering RFID academic research principals to analyze engineering issues that have hampered the deployment of RFID and to share “best practices” learnings from their work. By extending the original work of the Auto-ID Center at MIT and the subsequent Auto-ID Labs consortium led by MIT that now comprises seven world-renowned research universities on four continents, this book seeks to establish a baseline for what RFID technology works today and identifies areas requiring research on which other researchers in academic, commercial, and regulatory agencies can build.

The researchers represented in these pages have gathered on three continents in the course of the RFID Academic Convocations, a research collaboration hosted by the Auto-ID Labs that started in January of 2006, at MIT, and was followed by events co-hosted with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Auto-ID Labs at Fudan University in Shanghai, as RFID Live! 2007 pre-conference events, and by the event in Brussels organized with the European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (DGIT) and the Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge University. These Convocations bring together academic researchers with industry representatives and regulatory stakeholders to collaborate across disciplines and institutions to identify challenges faced by industry in adopting RFID technology.