Remote Science

In the future, educators and experimental scientists will be able to work with remote colonies of taskable machines via a ``remote science'' paradigm that allows:

• Spatial decoupling of experimenters and their experiments. This allows: (i) multiple users in different locations to share collaboratively a single physical resource (cf. notions of virtual ``collaboratories'' [41]), and (ii) enhanced productivity through reduced travel time, enabling one experimenter to participate in multiple, geographically distributed experiments.
• Sharing of expensive physical resources. In a climate of ``big science'' and constrained budgets, shared operation of scientific hardware is the only mechanism that can enable widespread availability and affordability of such equipment. Remote science helps level the playing field for researchers constrained by location or budget.
• Evolution of more rigorous standards for scientific discourse. Particularly in experimental engineering disciplines such as robotics, descriptions of experimental protocols can be vague, leading to irreproducibility of results. We believe that any mechanism for remote science transparently enforces experiment reproducibility since the remote researcher must completely specify his experiment prior to submitting it for remote execution.
• Improved access of K-12 and undergraduate educators to leading-edge pedagogical material (cf. [26]). Again, an Internet-based remote science infrastructure will provide the means to escape from geographical and financial constraints. User interfaces built using HTML or similar graphical formats will facilitate access by casual or naive users.