There are two ‘Internet of Things’ workshops in the next couple of months, the first is called From RFID to the Internet of Things from 6-7 March 2006 at the EU in Brussels:

A two day conference in relation to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based systems and their evolution towards ever smarter networked objects. Issues addressed cover wireless networking and Internet evolution, security, tags, sensors devices and their various applications. This workshop aims at defining future requirements for collaborative research at EU level, notably in the context of the preparation of the next IST research Programme of the Union, and to analyse with experts the likely social, policy and economic impact of these technologies.

This seems to be part of wider European initiatives to look at the potential for RFID, and is strongly influenced by the recent ITU report. The workshop is technical and will likely focus on technology and network issues, perhaps lacking social and cultural perspectives.

The second is called RFID Workshop “Internet of Things” from 9-11 May 2006 at Mediamatic in Amsterdam:

In our RFID workshops we explore the social implications and artistic possibilities of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. This technology uniquely identifies physically tagged objects, and is expected to prompt an all-round ‘Internet of Things’. Through a fruitful mixture of theory and hands-on experimentation, participants get to turn their ideas into creative RFID prototypes.

My past experiences with the Mediamatic RFID workshops have been really good, and I would highly recommend getting involved.

Also on the horizon, various ubiquitous, pervasive, mobile, hci and design conferences:

Pervasive 2006 in Dublin
DIS 2006 in Penn State
Ubicomp 2006 in Orange County
ISEA 2006 in San Jose
MobileHCI in Espoo (Helsinki)
NordiCHI in Oslo

19 February 2006 by Timo