ITR/IM: Labscape: Ubiquitous Computing for Experiment Capture in the Biology Laboratory

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The objective of Labscape is to enable individual lab workers to contribute to a fine-grained formal representation of ongoing lab activities i.e., to build the database by doing the work, without having to stop and write things down in a notebook or to enter information into a computer. By eliminating the redundancy of doing the work and then recording it, accuracy and completeness will be improved. And, by capturing information at a finer detail than possible for manual entry systems, varied and novel applications can be supported. This research supports the development of both an effective scientific working environment and an effective scientific learning environment but supporting better artifacts arising from the work or learning.. There are two primary research thrusts of this proposal. The first is the highly domain specific question of how and what data should be captured in the physical context of performing an experiment -- this is both a data representation and a human-computer interaction problem. The required domain expertise is derived from close cooperation with the University of Washington's Cell Systems Initiative (CSI) and its corporate and academic affiliates. The second question is how to obtain good system properties in distributed laboratory environments characterized by high degrees of device and personal mobility. For this application, security, reliability, and functional extensibility are some of the most important properties. These issues will be investigated in concert with UW's Portolano program whose objective is to develop general device, networking, middleware, and programming technologies for ubiquitous computing applications.