IntelliBadge™: Towards providing location-aware value-added services at academic conferences

This paper contains details on a project aimed to provide location-aware value-added services to the participants of an academic conference. The major characteristic of this project is the fusion of RFID technology, database management, data mining, real-time information visualization, and interactive web application technologies into an operational integrated system deployed at a major public conference. The developed system tracks conference attendees, analyzes the tracking data in real-time and provides various services to the attendees, such as a real-time snapshot of the conference events attendance, the ability to locate friends in the convention center, and the ability to search for events of interest. The results of this experiment were revealing in terms of both the potential of the developed technology and the conference dynamics.