Kevin Ashton
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Kevin Ashton (born 1968 in Birmingham, England) is a British technology pioneer who cofounded the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors. After the successful conclusion of the Auto-ID Center in 2003, Ashton became a Vice-President at RFID company ThingMagic, and began work on a popular science book about RFID.
Ashton was working as an assistant brand manager at Procter & Gamble in 1997 when he became interested in using RFID to help manage P&G's supply chain. He was recruited as an executive director by MIT professors Sanjay Sarma, Sunny Siu and MIT researcher David Brock. The center opened in 1999 as an industry sponsored, MIT research project with the express goal of creating a global open standard system to put RFID everywhere. Ashton acted as its Executive Director. Siu, then Sarma, acted as Research Director, later Chairman of Research. Under Ashton & Sarma's leadership, the number of sponsors grew to 103, and additional labs were funded at other major universities around the world. Once the EPC System was developed, MIT licensed it to non-profit standards body GS1 and the Auto-ID Center project reached a successful conclusion. The labs were renamed Auto-ID Labs and continue their research.
In addition to his role at ThingMagic, Ashton writes a regular column for RFID Journal magazine; wrote the Foreword to "RFID: Privacy, Security & Applications" (Addison-Wesley, 2005); and speaks regularly on RFID to audiences around the world. His book is due in 2007.
