Visiting our Auto-ID Lab in Keio

After the pervasive conference in Nara I headed back to Tokyo again to visit our Keio Auto-ID Lab in Fujisawa. Besides discussing the continuation of the Internet of Things conference we started back in 2008 in Zurich, I got a nice tour and was particularly amazed to see the works on the recorder tag [1] and tag monitor, an active RFID tag mimicing a passive tag but allowing to monitoring the data-traffic between tag and reader.
My schedule was pretty packed and intense. First, I gave short talk (slides) about what we are doing in Zurich, then had the great chance of visiting a lecutre of Jeff Lawrence, global policy officer of Intel (you find a short bio here). Quite interesting, this lecture was broadcasted live to several other universities in Asia. He talked (these slides are mostly it) about policy in digital content policy. He mentioned that protection does not have to be perfect, e.g. DVD is broken but still supports a business model (the same argument also applies to anti-counterfeiting). France has passed a law against content protection - most important argument: access to internet is a human right! Intel wants to press ahead, rather lead than follow, as a tech provider for hollywood when selling technical assets: if people do not like it they do not use it at all. He mentioned the case of betamax: hollywood tried to make the producers liable. Generally, he outlined that policy always comprises different bodies: service providers, content providers, it, ce, government.

Intel's policy perspective is: everything free vs. content is king, respect intellectual proprty for right holders and consumers. Protected content but should be moveable.

Law cannot solve all problems: it's about business and not about good or bad.

Every content scheme is to be broken: only good enough to break business model...does not work against hackers - but that's law enforcement is for. Overal goals: keep honest people honest, perfect systems are not possible, commercial viability is key.

Technology goals: design freedom, low cost (no body pays for protection), world-wide availability. "Apple builds services to sell elegant devices...", Intel want's to acknowledge a diversity of sources, where as Apple is just in verticals. His final thoughts were interesting: DRM-free is the best world - but how to make money out of it?

Finally, I also could arrange a last-minute meeting with Masaki Ito who gave me a nice tour around Prof. Hideyuki Tokoda's Lab. They showed me impressive prototypes of the objsampler [2] - a pipette that records real objects one encounters over time - and the airy nodes [3] that measured the temperature in Tokyo's Shinjuki garden and focussed on simplyfying the set-up of larger sensor networks. In the end I also got to see the smart they are currently setting-up allowing to experiment with smart home environments where various items can be controlled remotely, e.g. mobile phone.
Overall, I very much enjoyed my visit at Keio and I'm looking forward to get back there for a much longer stay some time later...

[1] MITSUGI, JIN; TOKUMASU, OSAMU; HADA, HISAKAZU: RF Tag with RF and Baseband Communication Interfaces for Product Lifecycle Management, Auto-ID Labs Whitepaper, 2009, AUTOIDLABS-WP-HARDWARE-046.pdf
[2] Junichi Yura, Hideaki Ogawa, Taizo Zushi, Jin Nakazawa, Hideyuki Tokuda, "objSampler: A Ubiquitous Logging Tool for Recording Encounters with Real World Objects" rtcsa, pp.36-41, 12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006
[3] Ito, M.; Katagiri, Y.; Ishikawa, M.; Tokuda, H., "Airy Notes: An Experiment of Microclimate Monitoring in Shinjuku Gyoen Garden" Networked Sensing Systems, 2007. INSS '07. Fourth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.260-266, 6-8 June 2007