27 Sep E-business conference to give sneak peek into university RFID laboratory
MADISON, Wis. — A new RFID lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will give an advance showing September 29 to attendees of the its e-business conference.
The university’s E-Business Institute is holding its seventh annual E-Business Best Practices and Emerging Technologies Conference at the Monona Terrace.
RFID, which involves tagging products or shipments with labels responsive to radio frequencies so they can be monitored and counted, is of growing importance in manufacturing. Last year, Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense announced they would require suppliers to use RFID by 2005.
UW-Madison’s new lab will play host to collaborative efforts from corporations, officials said. Many companies have already joined the UW RFID Industry Workgroup since it was established last year.
“This will give us the ability to conduct unbiased research to understand the true capabilities of this technology, and provide companies a valuable ‘sandbox’ to learn about and experiment with RFID through hands-on workshops and sponsored projects,” said Raj Veeramani, a professor of engineering and business at UW-Madison and director of the UW E-Business Institute.
Potential uses for RFID include supply-chain management, tracking baggage in airports and identifying medicines to make counterfeiting harder. RFID tags work by responding to radio signals on particular frequencies; they do not typically emit beacon signals.
Besides allowing people to track items at a distance without manually scanning bar codes, RFID tags do not have to be placed on outside surfaces vulnerable to wear and tear, which can make bar codes unreadable.