{"id":170178,"date":"2008-12-26T07:22:17","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T07:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/sixthsense\/"},"modified":"2017-06-16T11:32:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-16T18:32:30","slug":"sixthsense","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/sixthsense\/","title":{"rendered":"SixthSense"},"content":{"rendered":"

RFID based enterprise intelligence<\/p>\n

The vision of the SixthSense project in the\u00a0MNS group <\/a>at Microsoft Research India is the workplace or home of the future where computing is extended to encompass non-computing entities such as people, objects, and spaces to enable rich user experiences. For instance, we would like users to be able to search the physical world for objects they may have misplaced or use physical events to index their experiences (e.g., “was my laptop with me when I received a phone call from person X?”).<\/p>\n

The key technology underlying SixthSense is Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID. The technology comprises inexpensive tags that are attached to objects and readers that are able to read these tags from some distance. RFID is widely used to track the movement of goods<\/em> through a supply chain. In a typical setting, a reader installed at the entrance of a warehouse can track pallets as they are moved in or out of the warehouse.<\/p>\n

In SixthSense, we extend the domain of RFID to settings where there is a rich interaction amongst people<\/em> and between people and objects. To this end, we consider an enterprise setting of the future where people (or rather their employee badges) and their personal objects such as books, laptops, and mobile phones are tagged with cheap, passive RFID tags, and there is good coverage of RFID readers in the workplace. See the figure below for an illustration of such a setting.<\/p>\n

SixthSense provides a platform for RFID-based enterprise intelligence applications. SixthSense combines mobility information obtained from RFID-based sensing with information from enterprise systems such as calendar and presence, to automatically draw inferences about the association and interaction amongst people, objects, and workspaces. For instance, SixthSense is able to automatically distinguish between people and objects, learn the identities of people, and infer the ownership of objects by people. SixthSense also infers when an object has been interacted with by a user, for example, when a a user picks up their mobile phone.<\/p>\n

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SixthSense is a platform in that its programming model makes the inferences made automatically available to applications via a rich set of APIs. To demonstrate the capabilities of the SixthSense platform, we have prototyped a few applications using these APIs, including a misplaced object alert service, an enhanced calendar service, and rich annotation of video with physical events. We also discuss the issue of safeguarding user privacy in the context of SixthSense.<\/p>\n\t\t\t

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