The next revolution in commerce may have begun with a child's toy. Growing up in Delhi, India, Sanjay Sarma spent much of his time playing with building toys, constructing various gadgets. As the years passed, his projects got more complex, until eventually Sarma was experimenting with his home's electrical system. "I blew out the fuses a few times," he says. "I was a dangerous animal."

This nuclear physicist's son has come a long way. As research director of the Auto-ID Center, a business consortium that's the primary advocate of radio-frequency identification technology, he's helping define RFID systems, which may one day use tiny microchips to track everything from massive cargo containers to individual tubes of toothpaste.

	ON HIS FAVORITE MOVIE: 'Monty Python And The Holy Grail' reminds Sarma of days 'the responsible side of my brain tries to forget'

"Sanjay is undoubtedly responsible for the vision of the Auto-ID Center and for the fact that it's becoming a reality," says Peter Cole, professor of RFID systems at Australia's University of Adelaide and director of the Auto-ID Center's Adelaide lab.

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Sarma, 34, took a job as a field engineer for Schlumberger Oilfield Services, a British company that stationed him in the Arctic Circle as a drill-equipment operator. Sarma became intrigued by robots the company used for deep-sea exploration and decided to pursue a career in robotics.

Two degrees (a master's from Carnegie Mellon and a doctorate from U.C. Berkeley) later, Sarma was working as a mechanical engineering professor at MIT. He met David Brock, a researcher in MIT's artificial-intelligence lab, and one day they brainstormed in a hallway on how to get robots to recognize objects. "I wouldn't be in this field if I hadn't had that meeting," Sarma says. "He asked me, 'Why do you have to perceive objects to recognize them? Why not just put an RFID tag on it?'"

In 1999, the two engineers founded the Auto-ID Center.

But that doesn't mean the boy with the building toys has given up tinkering. "If this technology is deployed correctly, and it's designed with care, attention, and responsibility, it can have a huge impact on our lives in a positive way."
--David M. Ewalt