Kevin Ashton

Who is Kevin Ashton?

Kevin Ashton 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. He is known for inventing the term "The Internet of Things" to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors.

Ashton was born in Birmingham, UK. He 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. This work led him to MIT, where he helped start an RFID research consortium called the Auto-ID Center with professors Sanjay Sarma and Sunny Siu and researcher David Brock. The center opened in 1999 as an industry sponsored research project with the goal of creating a global open standard system to put RFID everywhere. Ashton was the Center's Executive Director. Siu, then Sarma, acted as Research Director, later Chairman of Research. Under Ashton and Sarma's leadership, the number of sponsors grew to 103, and additional labs were funded at other major universities around the world. Once the system was developed, MIT licensed it to not-for-profit standards body GS1 and the project reached a successful conclusion. The labs were renamed Auto-ID Labs and continue their research.