Year: 2015
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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.
Institution: Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W2144119334