AMD Project @ The Last HOPE

about us

What is the AMD project?
The AMD, or "Attendee Meta-Data", project is an attempt to take an emerging technology called RFID and transparently show how it is capable of being used. In addition, it uses a concept called "interest tags" to allow participants to not only get a better conference experience, but also gives them a new way to connect with other people.

What is RFID? How does it track me?
RFID is an acronym for "radio frequency identification". In the case of the AMD project, people can wear a special badge with an RFID "chip" inside which responds to RFID "readers" placed around the conference. The chip can tell the reader where it is, and we can use that to follow people around the conference. Due to obvious privacy concerns, it only follows people in the most public areas (such as talk rooms). People who are not on the mezzanine or 18th floor will not be trackable.

What, specifically, are you tracking?
The only thing that gets tracked is the RFID number burned into the badge (for example, "2001"). No personal information is stored on the badge. However, if you create a profile, everything you enter can be used in tracking, so we can track as much or as little information as you want.

What are interest tags? How are they being used in AMD?
Interest tags are bits of data pertaining to a subject at hand. For example, the image website Flickr uses interest tags to help users sort images. In AMD, users with RFID badges can log into the website, and on the "participate" page, they can select up to five interests they may share with other conference attendees. We can use these interests to determine other people you may want to meet.

Why do you want all this other info? What are you doing with it?
The other information we are collecting is voluntary, but will help enhance your convention experience. This includes your age, email address, and home town. In addition, you can share your cell phone number, which is stored, encrypted (blowfish) in a database and is only accessible to the server scripts. Your age and home town can be used for things like meetup groups. Let's say you're from St. Louis. Wouldn't it be cool if you got an email letting you know that everyone from St. Louis was meeting up at 5pm to go out for dinner?
Your phone number can help enhance the experience even more. Would you like a text message reminder of a talk you wanted to see, 15 minutes before the talk, to make sure you didn't forget it? Or maybe you'd like to get ahold of someone you met, but only remember their handle. Now you can use the AMD system to make that new connection.

Why is all this important?
This project is an exploration of RFID and people networking. We want to see what the technology is capable of doing, and how people respond to it. It is also an effort to make people aware of how it works, because we forsee a lot of RFID technology in the upcoming decade. If we understand how it works, we can embrace it and control it. If we don't other people will wind up controlling us.