New Frontiers

Clive van Heerden, creative director of Philips ‘Design Probes‘ program, explains their research methods based on design provocations. Through different examples such as skin tatoos, new textiles forms he shows how these "probes" are employed to understand people’s reactions and therefore better understand the future lifestyle in 2020/30.

From the Jurassic Era of the Internet to its Futures

IP protocol inventor Vinton Cerf, who is now Vice President and Internet Evangelist at Google gave the concluding talk at Lift 09. After a quick recap of the history of the Internet, he basically gives an enthusiastic tour of its current limits (bitrot, IP address shortage) as well projects about its evolution, such as interplanetary internet though satellites.

Melanie Rieback, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, gives an overview of the security and privacy issues concerning Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. As a a "white hat hacker", she showed how she was able to break RFID systems in order to show to other people how to fix them.

Dr. Melanie Rieback is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in the group of Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Melanie’s research concerns the security and privacy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads multidisciplinary research teams on RFID security (RFID Malware) and RFID privacy management (RFID Guardian) projects. Her research has attracted worldwide media attention, appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, Computerworld, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets. Melanie’s research has received several awards (Best Paper: IEEE PerCom ‘06, Best Paper: USENIX Lisa ‘06, NWO I/O Prize, VU Mediakomeet, ISOC Award finalist), and Melanie has also served as an invited expert for RFID security discussions with both the American and Dutch governments. In a past life, Melanie also worked on the Human Genome Project at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research.

On february 27, in the “New frontiers” lecture Melanie Rieback will discuss the evolution of security with regards to RFIDs.

Link to the LIFT profile of the person: LIFT profile