http://www.nature.com/nsu/021125/021125-1.html
Delegates tagged and tracked Radio transmitters follow scientists round conference. 26 November 2002 GEOFF BRUMFIEL Tagged attendees walked an average of 4.1 miles. ) D. Reed Scientists often use radio tags to track elusive animals. But at last week's Supercomputing 2002 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, they used them on each other. Each researcher carried a small transmitter identifying their specialization. "They were tracked within the conference and the information was turned around in real time to the conferees," says Dan Reed, a conference chair and director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The idea, he says, is to help researchers figure out where colleagues with similar interests are hanging out. Screens throughout the conference centre summarized the details, as did a website that delegates could access through a wireless network in the building. Supercomputing is an annual meeting of scientists involved in high-performance processing, networking and data technologies. The five-day conference focused on the scientific and defence-related applications of supercomputing for fields from high-energy physics to nuclear-stockpile stewardship. The tag system also collected factoids about the behaviour of the conference-goers. For instance, that the average attendee walked 4.1 miles over the course of the meeting. Different specialsts congregate in different places. ) D. Reed Rather than forcing attendees to wear a radio collar or affix a tag to their ear, Reed and his colleagues attached the transmitters to the name badges delegates wore. The programme was entirely voluntary. Tracking people is already commonplace in private industry. Delivery personnel for United Parcel Service (UPS), for example, carry global-positioning sensors, so that supervisors can follow the day's shipments. Geoff Brumfiel is the Washington physical sciences correspondent for Nature. ) Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002
