When
Where
Recent advances in edge computing, automation/autonomy, and artificial intelligence (AI) are leading many institutions to build “smart” autonomous experimental laboratories and user facilities. These institutions integrate complex solutions that automate workflows (i.e., instrument setup and tuning, sample synthesis and processing, measurements, data analysis, and model-driven data interpretation) and make them “smart” by incorporating AI/ML to bring about revolutionary efficiencies and research outcomes. Unfortunately, there has been limited coordination across the various scientific communities to develop a common research infrastructure for autonomous “smart” laboratories and user facilities. This lack of coordination has led to a variety of solutions that often overlap but do not inherently interoperate resulting in stove-piped “smart” labs and user facilities.
The primary goal of the E-SAIL workshop is to bring together scientists with diverse expertise to increase collaboration efforts in the development of a common science research ecosystem for current and future “smart” labs and user facilities. We propose to focus on “Ecosystem Advancements and Development” and “Ecosystem Users,” as described below, as we see these as two key topics when creating a common ecosystem for the Instrument-to-Edge-to-Cloud-to-HPC scientific continuum.
The first topic for the E-SAIL workshop highlights recent advances in the development of interconnected/interoperable ecosystems along with their associated architectures. This is a key topic for our workshop because if a common ecosystem is not created and agreed upon, the disparate science communities will continue building stove-pipe solutions making interconnectivity and interoperability impossible. We acknowledge that developing a common ecosystem is an extraordinarily broad topic, so we highlight key subtopics (see Tentative Topics below) for our first E-SAIL workshop. We anticipate that these subtopics provide a good foundation to build immediate collaboration interests, while the main topic is broad enough to ensure interesting subtopics for future E-SAIL workshops.
The second topic focuses on the end user of any future common ecosystem (e.g., experimental scientists, modeling and simulation scientists, computational scientists, …). For our first E-SAIL workshop, we propose to focus the discussion on use cases and user experience. We foresee end users as a critical topic as there is a real need for co-design between the user community and the computer science teams that develop solutions that enable “smart” labs and user facilities. It is key to understand current and future use cases as well as understanding how to design good user interfaces to help adoption of any common ecosystem across multiple science domains.
The E-SAIL 2023 workshop program consists of several presentations in the areas of ecosystem software architectures & solutions and ecosystem use cases & user experience. Each presentation will be 20-25 minutes long. Interested speakers are invited to submit a 1-page abstract in PDF format.
Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and speakers will be invited based on originality, technical strength, significance, and relevance to the workshop. Invited speakers will need to register for the workshop via the ISC-HPC conference.