iLabs

Researchers:

George Herring, PhD Candidate, Stanford University, gherring@stanford.edu
Lars Thorben Neustock, PhD Candidate, Stanford University, larstn@stanford.edu

iLabs is a platform for interactive display of complex experiments or simulations. It provides an imersive, interactive, and social environment for exploring scientific questions, enabling improved publication of scientific results. This tool facilitates ongoing scientific education for audiences ranging from students through to peer researchers.

The display of data, the core of the platform, relies on turning an experiment into a digital data set. Then, the platform recreates the controls of the original experiment or simulation and allows each user to interactively change the control parameters, while the platform displays the corresponding data and image sets. Thus, the experience of operating an MSOL (Massively Scalable Online Laboratory) is analogous to operating a real experiment, including features like noise and unpredictable behavior. Most importantly, the approach is scalable, allowing multiple users to access the same experiment simultaneously, while independently controlling their experimental view. Thus, this tool can easily be adopted into online courses, MOOCs, or approaches for crowd research. The social features allow users to ask questions to the experimenter and better connect with other relevant research fields. We employ the iLabs platform for our teaching as well as for science outreach.

References:

• Lars Thorben Neustock, George Herring, and Hesselink Lambertus. Interactive peer education: Virtual interactive scalable online notebooks for science (visons). In Global Engineering Education Conference, in press. IEEE, 2018b.
• George Herring, Lars Thorben Neustock, and Lambertus Hesselink. Learning from the unexpected: Statistics and uncertainty in massively scalable online laboratories (msol). In Global Engineering Education Conference, in press. IEEE, 2018.
• Lars Thorben Neustock, George K Herring, and Lambertus Hesselink. Remote experimentation with massively scalable online laboratories. In Online Engineering & Internet of Things, pages 258–265. Springer, 2017.