MIT Museum Exhibit
iLabs Panel Text
"If you can't come to the lab...the lab will come to you!" - Jesus del Alamo, Professor of Electrical Engineering
iLab - Bringing the Lab to You
The ability to conduct hands-on experiments is critical to helping students link their classroom work to that of the real world. Unfortunately, universities around the world often lack the facilities and sufficient funds to provide the full scale laboratories and work environments needed to conduct such experiments. The iLab architecture provides a solution to this problem.
The iLab architecture allows for the fast and easy deployment of on-line labs, real laboratories accessed through the internet, thus allowing students at MIT and around the world to conduct a range of experiments in real time. The lab equipment can be utilized 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, cutting down on management efforts for those running the lab, and eliminating scheduling conflicts for students. Students find the ability to work on their experiments beyond class time a huge benefit, and this in turn has expanded the use of experiments in courses at MIT. Moreover, the ability to capture data from each run of the experiment allows students to introduce new data sets and do successive runs. iLab is based on the idea of sharing expensive lab equipment and educational materials associated with lab experiments as broadly as possible.
The iLab Shared Architecture, developed at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT (CECI), separates the design of an iLab into three distinct parts:
- The Lab Server is connected to the lab equipment and deals with the actual operation of the equipment;
- The Lab Client is installed on the student's computer and is the interface to the operation of the lab;
- The Service Broker mediates exchanges between the Lab Server and the Lab Client over the Web and provides common administrative services, such as authentication and data storage.
Started by Jesus del Alamo and lead by a team of researchers and educators, MIT has developed and deployed five iLabs: Microelectronics Device Analyzer and Digital Signal Analyzer (electrical engineering), Heat Exchanger and Polymer Crystallization (chemical engineering), and Shake Table (civil engineering).
Today, using the iLab architecture students from Cambridge, UK to Queensland, Australia, and Uganda are greatly expanding the range of experiment they are exposed to. MIT provides on open source development kit (http://icampus.mit.edu/ilabs) and a public Service Broker (http://openilabs@mit.edu). Using this, educators are encouraged to develop their own iLab and then share them with other schools, furthering the main goal of this project - to bring the lab to you.
Principal investigators: Jesus del Alamo, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Steven R. Lerman, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Class of 1922 Professor and Director of CECI, and V. Judson Harward, Principal Research Scientist, CECI.