Spotlight

Project Spotlight: iLab

Students are more motivated and can learn more effectively if they have the opportunity to conduct experiments. However, many engineering classes do not include a lab component because of significant expense and space considerations. iLab created remote web-accessible laboratories to provide a new framework of science and engineering courses. Remote laboratories allow for much more efficient use of laboratory equipment and give students the opportunity to conduct experiments from the comfort of an Internet accessible browser.

Consider iLab. The project to offer remote access to lab equipment was conceived before Web services standards had fully gelled. But with Web services underpinning their applications, MIT academics can imagine instituting a barter system with other universities to share time on expensive testing equipment used by students across the globe.

iLab was born in microelectronics classes taught by electrical engineering professor Jesus del Alamo. In 1998, he rigged up a system to let microelectronics students at MIT test transistors over the Internet, rather than requiring the students to be in the same room as the equipment. The obvious benefit for students was more convenient access to labs. But del Alamo could see potentially more significant benefits for MIT. With a networked system, the university could schedule access to expensive equipment more efficiently and open up access to its gear by other academic institutions.

Through the iCampus initiative, del Alamo and other colleagues expanded the basic idea of remote lab testing to other academic disciplines. They chose Web services as the software to link highly specialized lab equipment with university networks and the Internet.

MIT set up a cross-discipline team called the Center for Educational Technology Initiatives. The group is in the process of building a generalized system designed to allow universities to bring the Web to many types of lab equipment--from heat exchange machines used in chemical engineering classes to shaking tables used to test the sturdiness of civil engineering projects.

"The attractiveness of Web services is that we thought that the protocols would be much more likely to not be tripped up by different network policies at different universities," said Jud Harward, senior architect at MIT's iLab project. "We wanted something vendor-independent that would work across organizational lines."

MIT has already used an early version of its lab-sharing system with a partner at the University of Singapore and is working on a project to extend lab access to African universities as well.

(Source: Martin LaMonica, CNET, "Academic gets creative with Web services," 10/27/03)

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