Ubiquitous Computing in the Biology Laboratory

Abstract

Our objective is to eliminate the digital divide that persists between the physical and information spaces of wet-lab based enterprises by embedding computational resources into the shared laboratory environment. Our first challenge is to enable individual lab workers to contribute to a fine-grained formal representation of ongoing lab activities — 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 is practical for manual entry systems, unanticipated applications can be supported.