Carl Hostetter
LabNotes and FieldNotes: A Mobile Suite for Scientific Instrument Control, Data Acquisition, and Collaborative Exploration

Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:20 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

The mobile device revolution (smartphones/tablets/pods/pads) has occasioned the proliferation of powerful, portable, low-cost, energy-efficient, sensor-rich, and location-aware computational devices. It is inevitable that such devices will be brought to bear on the problem of supporting scientific instruments, as low-cost alternatives for instrument control and data acquisition, processing, archiving, and distribution; as well as for exploratory and collaborative field work requiring the coordinated data collection and observation of devices and people distributed over wide areas. The advent of powerful, inexpensive, lightweight, sensor-rich, and multimedia-capable mobile devices means that investigators can each be equipped with highly-portable devices that combine powerful computing and display capabilities with real-time, geo-located data streams, representing a dramatic reduction in both equipment cost and bulk compared with just a few years ago. Teams of scientific investigators equipped with such mobile devices, and apps that coordinate and facilitate the capture and exchange of scientific data and observation information collected with these devices, could thus collaborate in real-time and in situ, and explore environments more efficiently and thoroughly, for much less cost and with far less bulk than ever before. LabNotes and FieldNotes are just such a suite of mobile apps designed to enable this greatly improved acquisition and collaborative capability and efficiency.

Carl Hostetter is a Computer Engineer with the Science Data Processing Branch/587.0 of the Software Engineering Division of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. With Troy Ames/587.0, he is a co-developer of the Interoperable Remote Component (IRC) software framework, which was the NASA Goddard Software of the Year award winner and NASA SOTY runner-up for 2007. LabNotes and FieldNotes deploy the core concepts and capabilities of IRC in the mobile age, and thus leverage the opportunities presented by the proliferation of powerful, low-cost, low-energy, connected, and location-aware devices for scientific and exploratory applications.
IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: John Donohue

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