emsl function types

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL) Collaboratory

at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

SCHOOL OF INFORMATION

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

EMSL function types

• Primary type: shared instrument

• Secondary: product development, expert consultation

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

EMSL collaboratory basics

• Makes NMR instruments at Pacific Northwest Labs available to external users remotely

• DOE funded instruments, mandated 50% of instrument time to external users

• EMSL collaboratory has developed both synchronous and asychronous tools to support remote use

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Clarification of terms

• External users- not housed at PNNL

• Remote users- external users who decide to operate instruments remotely

• Local experts- scientists who work at PNNL full time

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Phases of EMSL

1993- StartupInternal funding +subcontract

1996 Development

DOE 2000

2001Ongoing-

Split operations and research

Explore toolset, Develop CORE2000

Pilot study usage

Continue CORE2000

Adopt VNC

Develop E-Lab notebook

Continued operations at EMSL- internally funded

NATIONAL COLLABORATORIES Continued research on E- Lab Notebooks and middleware

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Access to…

• Access to instruments

• Acess to people

• Access to information

SCHOOL OF INFORMATION

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Access to instruments

• NMR set at PNNL, + other instruments at PNNL

• Higher powered NMRs are oversubscribed 2x to 3x

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Access to people

• Dedicated staff for external user support

• Onsite scientists have a fund to charge for assisting external users

• Work with onsite scientists often turns into full-fledged collaboration

• Remote access means less casual contact with other users- Balkanization

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Access to information

• Electronic Lab Notebook provides small group workspace

• Little demand for larger-scale knowledge management (e.g. other researchers’ experiments) due to the small project size of the scientific work

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Technology used

• CORE 2000

• VNC

• E-lab notebook

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

CORE 2000 (Collaborative research environment)

• Screen sharing

• Chat, whiteboard

• Video conferencing, remote-control camera on instrument panel

• Molecular modeling

• Voting tool

• Extensible

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

VNC

• Replaced custom tele-viewer• General purpose screen sharing, uses

whatever interface is available• Free, open source from AT&T lab London• Supplemented with phone, instrument

camera• (Is commoditification the future of

collaboratory tools?)

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Electronic Lab Notebook

• General purpose lab notebook• Form-based text and formula composition,

editing, publishing • Image capture+ molecular modeling software• Two levels of security, digital signatures• Can capture direct from instruments, including

settings and output• ‘Killer app’ for collaborations that are

distributed, image-intensive, or access controlled

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Resourcediagram

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Issues from diagram

• Flow of money is much simpler than a fee-for-service, one of the EMSL success factors

• Balkanization issue- remote users don’t talk to each other (do they need to?)

• PNNL very central for information flow, instrument time allocation, opportunity for co-publication

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Usage

• Instruments oversubscribed for external users, proposals evaluated and time awarded on a 6-month schedule

• Remote acces is optional for all remote users, currently is about 25% of use

• Not always the same 25%!• Often groups include both collocated

and remote collaborators• (E-lab has a separate base of ~1500

registered users)

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Motivation of collaborators

• Professional support• Local experts have a fund to draw from

for external user support• Collaboration (co-authorship) is

common between local and remote users

• Co-authorship usually given to instrument experts

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Diffusion of innovation

• Reasons for using:– Save $ on travel– Involve more people, e.g. students, outside

collaborators– Occasional changes of plans, e.g. pregnancy

• Other factors promoting adoption– Fits with existing practice– Trialability- use students to try out remote

access with lower risk

– Adoption by new disciplines-- Biologists

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Diffusion of innovation

• Where is EMSL on the adoption curve?

• Is 25-30% remote use the peak penetration for this facility?

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Diffusion of innovation

• Given that this project has tried a nearly comprehensive set of collaboratory technologies…

• What set of CORE 2000 and ELN are most used/ useful?

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Operations versus R&D

• Some EMSL work was funded to support current users, some R&D

• Pragmatic concern for users led to VNC adoption, de-emphasis of some other aspects

• Yet there was always some research $ available for advanced development

• This balance seems to have been very healthy- (was it?)