RFID - The Wireless Internet of Artifacts

The last twenty-five years have marked the coming of the personal computing and communication industry. Result: Individuals now carrying devices that are personal, mobile and always connected to the Internet. It is my belief that in the next twenty-five years, such information carrying and disseminating capability will extend from the "computing/communication devices" to real-world non-computing artifacts that we use in every day life such as clothes, utensils, furniture, packages, etc. These artifacts will collectively form what I refer to as the "Internet of Artifacts", an idea whose time has come. Like with any grand challenge, these artifacts will need to be uniquely identified (using technologies such as RFID), they will need to communicate with each other (wirelessly) and will gradually have the ability to take intelligent decisions first individually and then collectively. At UCLA\´s WINMEC (Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium), the Wireless "Internet of Artifacts" notion is being explored via a project called WinRFID (http://winmec.ucla.edu/rfid) -- which is the first generation of our implementation of this idea. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that can embody the identity and other related information of an artifact within a chip called a tag that has no power source and make such information available to an RFID transceiver when the tag receives the RF transmission and its coupled energy. RFID tags are expected to eventually be embedded into every daily-life artifact.