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

Labscape的目标是使单个实验室工作人员能够对正在进行的实验室活动进行细粒度的正式表示，通过工作来建立数据库，而不必停下来在笔记本上写下东西或将信息输入计算机。通过消除重复的工作，然后记录它，准确性和完整性将得到提高。而且，通过以比手动输入系统更精细的细节捕获信息，可以支持各种新颖的应用。这项研究支持有效的科学工作环境和有效的科学学习环境的发展，但支持更好的工件从工作或学习中产生。这项建议有两个主要的研究重点。第一个是高度领域特定的问题，即在执行实验的物理环境中应该如何捕获数据以及捕获什么数据-这既是数据表示也是人机交互问题。所需的领域专业知识来自与华盛顿大学的细胞系统倡议（CSI）及其企业和学术分支机构的密切合作。第二个问题是如何在分布式实验室环境中获得良好的系统性能，其特征在于高度的设备和个人移动性。对于此应用程序，安全性、可靠性和功能可扩展性是一些最重要的属性。这些问题将与UW的Portolano计划一起进行调查，该计划的目标是为无处不在的计算应用开发通用设备，网络，中间件和编程技术。

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.