benjamin
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One of my primary areas of research and development during my time at the Beckman Institute was in remote and virtual instrumentation. Remote instrumentation refers to a software and hardware system that facilitates remote operation of a machine (a microscope in this case, but it could be any computer-connected machine) over the internet. By “virtual” instrumentation I mean a software package that allows one to browse and analyze high-resolution, multi-dimensional data from an instrument as if they were using that instrument in real time. This past work is partially responsible for my current interests in robotic painting [link].

Bugscope

The Bugscope project began in 1999 as a team effort to allow kids to operate our scanning electron microscope (SEM) over the web so that they could look at bugs. The idea is that a classroom teacher and/or their students would find and collect an insect from their own environment and send it to us in the mail. Then, at the appointed time, we would insert that insect into the microscope and the kids could login from their classroom and control the microscope to explore the bug at up to 500x magnification.

The project was a big hit and quickly garnered lots of attention from teachers and the media. It was covered by the New York Times and National Public Radio. My role at this stage of the project was as the software developer of the remote interface.

Bugscope continued to serve students and teachers worldwide for many years. But since we had written the software in 1999, when the web was still in its infancy, by 2005 or so it was looking and acting pretty dated. Interactive web technologies like AJAX had emerged and matured since Bugscope’s launch and it was time for a redesign. With funding from the Submeta foundation, I led a full redesign of every component from the ground up, including the server and client software, the website, image database, etc. A particular focus was on the interaction itself: how to improve it to such an extent that the software faded into the background. The redesign was a success, and since that point, the project has had a surge of renewed interest and activity.

The Bugscope team continues to provide regular sessions to kids worldwide. Please see the Bugscope project page for more information, and visit the credits page to see all of the people who were involved in the project.

Virtual Microscope

The Virtual Microscope was a NASA-funded project to provide a software system for browsing and analyzing high-resolution multi-dimensional image datasets. These datasets are captured in long automated sessions on the microscopes. The thousands of images from each session are “tiled” (stitched together) into one large hierarchical data file that can be browsed within the Virtual Microscope as if one were using the microscope itself.

I designed the interface and led the software development team on the project. In addition to the interface, backend software had to be written to facilitate the automated data collection and storage. The project received a NASA Software Award in 2007.