Science at the Speed of Thought - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 2

Fig. 1. Transition of solving important problems from unsolvable to solvable on your
laptop.

of exploration and lead to new insights and discovery. Creating an environment
that is ecient, general and flexible enough to work well across a wide variety
of scientific applications is at the heart of our Virtual Laboratory (VL) design.
In section 2, we describe the VL we are building at NIST to address these
issues. In section 3, we describe some applications. We present conclusions and
future work in section 4.

2 The Virtual Laboratory

The VL needs to be ecient, general, and flexible, but it also needs to be able to
get applications into it quickly in order to speed up the process of science and not
burden it. Representations and interactions of many types need to be available
and easily accessed. To accomplish this, our design consists of the following
components:
- A distributed computing environment that provides the communication fab-
ric of the VL,
- An immersive visualization environment that provides representation, inter-
action, and collaboration capability in the VL,
- A suite of tools for machine learning and analysis.
We will discuss each of these in turn.

2.1 Distributed Computing Environment

An important part of the VL is the capability of users to interact with their data
sources, analysis programs, and their experiments, either computer experiments
or laboratory experiments, from any of the supported VL access points (see Fig. 2