Workshop: Foundation for Unmanned Technological Utilization, Research, and Exploration (FUTURE) Labs

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The demands of global challenges impacting society in areas such as energy, sustainability, and healthcare require an accelerated pace of discovery, especially in discovery of new molecules and materials and the translation of these into green energy and sustainable growth applications. This pressing demand has sparked remarkable innovation in the area of Self-Driving Laboratories, with rapid growth in automated experimentation techniques and data science and AI methods to efficiently explore the vast space of possible experiments and speed up laboratory science. The Foundation for Unmanned Technological Utilization, Research, and Exploration (FUTURE) Labs workshop to be held at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina will explore the emergence of self-driving labs (SDLs)—which is already revolutionizing experimental science using robotics, lab automation, and AI. This two-day workshop will focus on charting a future path for self-driving labs and explore a vision for establishing 'Universal SDL Testbeds' as the cornerstone of next-generation research and educational infrastructure. The workshop will bring together a diverse, multidisciplinary group of academic and industrial researchers, including those from chemical and biomolecular engineering, materials science, computer science, biochemistry, robotics, sustainability science, education, ethics, and data science, to explore how SDLs can help accelerate materials and molecular discovery in the physical and life sciences by 100 to 1000 times.The workshop will emphasize participation by early-career faculty who will have an opportunity to showcase their work in SDLs, and SDL-related areas, via a poster session. Information about the meeting will be broadly disseminated to ensure participation by a a wide and diverse scientific and industry audience. The project/workshop steering committee will include researchers from academia as well as industry. A key objective of the workshop is to explore use and adoption of the SDL approach in industry, where it can have enormous impact on industrial productivity. The workshop will ensure participation by developers/builders of SDL’s as well as by users of SDLs. Pre-workshop meetings among participants will lay the groundwork for the vision, roadmap, and topics to be discussed at the workshop. The first day of the workshop will feature lightning talks, discussions related to the various technical areas that are critical to SDLs, and the poster session. The second day will focus on how the ideas and insights from the previous day can be translated into specific actionable items for impact on foundational as well as translational research using SDLs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.