With the advances of new technologies such as Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems and cyber-physical systems, the Internet-of-Things enables the inter-connection of small objects (tagged items, mobile devices, etc) and data collection, delivery, as well as processing among them. The inherent advantages of the RFID systems to identify, trace, and track information using easily deployable tags provide unique opportunities to enable many novel IoT applications in new areas of sensing, actuation, and user interaction, which is far beyond its traditional use in supply chain management. However, the design of these applications involves challenges, as the limited computation ability and simple functionality of passive tags may make them ill-fitted for meeting the diverse requirements of security, reliability, and scalability.

In this talk, Haofan Cai will present her research in exploring the potential of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID in the following themes: 1. Enabling cyber-physical connection using RFID passive tags, where the system can seamlessly detect user-item interaction and gather information from real-world subjects. 2. Fusing the information from computer vision and RFID sensing channels to actively find/track the mobile object/person with the least training efforts. 3. Authenticating RFIDs in the physical layer that can defend against major attacks including tag counterfeiting, signal replay, and brute-force feature reply.

Finally, she will discuss future projects in novel IoT systems and envision the future of large-scale and low-cost IoT techniques.

Haofan Cai (https://people.ucsc.edu/~hcai10/) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer science and Engineering at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), where she works with Prof. Chen Qian. Her research spans the broad areas of wireless networking, Internet-of-Things (IoT), mobile computing, computer vision, and network security. She mainly focuses on integrating large-scale and low-cost passive RFID tags into existing pervasive-sensing applications to enable multi-functional and cost-efficient IoT systems. Her works have been published in several top-tier networking conferences (Mobicom, ICNP, SECON) and journals (TON, TOSN).