TY - GEN
T1 - Interactive cloud experimentation for biology
T2 - 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015
AU - Hossain, Zahid
AU - Jin, Xiaofan
AU - Bumbacher, Engin W.
AU - Chung, Alice M.
AU - Koo, Stephen
AU - Shapiro, Jordan D.
AU - Truong, Cynthia Y.
AU - Choi, Sean
AU - Orloff, Nathan D.
AU - Blikstein, Paulo
AU - Riedel-Kruse, Ingmar H.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2015 ACM.
PY - 2015/4/18
Y1 - 2015/4/18
N2 - Interacting with biological systems via experiments is important for academia, industry, and education, but access barriers exist due to training, costs, safety, logistics, and spatial separation. High-throughput equipment combined with web streaming could enable interactive biology experiments online, but no such platform currently exists. We present a cloud experimentation architecture (paralleling cloud computation), which is optimized for a class of domain-specific equipments (biotic processing units - BPU) to share and execute many experiments in parallel remotely and interactively at all time. We implemented an instance of this architecture that enables chemotactic experiments with a slime mold Physarum Polycephelum. A user study in the blended teaching and research setting of a graduate-level biophysics class demonstrated that this platform lowers the access barrier for non-biologists, enables discovery, and facilitates learning analytics. This architecture is flexible for integration with various biological specimens and equipments to facilitate scalable interactive online education, collaborations, research, and citizen science.
AB - Interacting with biological systems via experiments is important for academia, industry, and education, but access barriers exist due to training, costs, safety, logistics, and spatial separation. High-throughput equipment combined with web streaming could enable interactive biology experiments online, but no such platform currently exists. We present a cloud experimentation architecture (paralleling cloud computation), which is optimized for a class of domain-specific equipments (biotic processing units - BPU) to share and execute many experiments in parallel remotely and interactively at all time. We implemented an instance of this architecture that enables chemotactic experiments with a slime mold Physarum Polycephelum. A user study in the blended teaching and research setting of a graduate-level biophysics class demonstrated that this platform lowers the access barrier for non-biologists, enables discovery, and facilitates learning analytics. This architecture is flexible for integration with various biological specimens and equipments to facilitate scalable interactive online education, collaborations, research, and citizen science.
KW - Automation
KW - Biology
KW - Cloud computing
KW - Cloud experimentation
KW - Cloud lab
KW - Education
KW - Remote experimentation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84951012037&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84951012037&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2702123.2702354
DO - 10.1145/2702123.2702354
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84951012037
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 3681
EP - 3690
BT - CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 18 April 2015 through 23 April 2015
ER -