Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Problems Slow Researchers Eager to Use Fast Networks for Controlling Distant Devices By FLORENCE OLSEN One alluring promise of the Internet2 project has been the sharing of expensive scientific instruments over high-speed research and education networks. Research departments envisioned buying a $200,000 scanning electron microscope, and then hooking up their instrument to the Internet2 Abilene network through a couple of relatively inexpensive computers. Scientists expected that global collaborations among researchers -- in, say, California, Sweden, Thailand, and elsewhere -- would be enhanced. Researchers at colleges that couldn't afford such equipment were also eager for other institutions to buy and share it. But as with any complex project, the hope of providing remotely controlled scientific instruments has posed difficult challenges for computer scientists and science researchers. "Rather than being something that's easy for everybody to do now, I guess it's something whose time will come," says Christopher L. Morgan, a professor of mathematics and computer science at California State University at Hayward. Mr. Morgan is writing the software that controls remote access to a Philips XL40 scanning electron microscope in Cal State Hayward's biological-sciences department. "It's an easy problem, until you actually try to solve it," he says. Even though he and his graduate students have already written thousands of lines of the necessary code, they are kept busy making additions and refinements -- to make focusing the microscope from remote locations easier, for example. "Quite a few universities have these microscopes, but very few have remote access," says Carol R. Lauzon, an assistant professor of biological sciences and director of operations for the microscopy center at Cal State Hayward. The Universities of California at San Diego, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Michigan, and Michigan Technological University are among the few other Internet2 institutions that are experimenting with remote network access to high-powered microscopes. Ms. Lauzon, who studies the bacterial relationships between insects and plants, can use the Hayward center's electron microscope when she collaborates with researchers at the University of California at Riverside and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. "We can be looking at the same thing at the same time and be talking to one another," she says. The researchers have a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study a bacterial pathogen that has destroyed more than 5 percent of California's grape vines and is threatening the state's wine industry. The bacteria live in the mouth and the gut of the glassy-winged sharpshooter, an insect that Ms. Lauzon and her colleagues study, aided by the magnification powers of the scanning electron microscope. "It's exciting to find things that people have never seen before," she says. From time to time, Ms. Lauzon works in other laboratories in other parts of the world. If necessary, she mails a physical specimen back to Hayward and uses the center's Web site to gain access to the microscope's remote controls. "I can almost be in two places at once," she says. Using the microscope's remote controls, researchers can change the magnification, and the contrast and brightness of the image, for example. Still, she says the microscope is easier to use if you are sitting down in front of it. "No matter how hard we try, we're still going to miss some of the information we get when we're right next to the instrument," Mr. Morgan says. Researchers say they hope to create a feeling of being in front of the microscope through "telepresence" and "tele-immersion" studies, which are big areas of Internet2 research. Meanwhile, Mr. Morgan says he is concentrating his immediate efforts on developing software that will automatically focus the remote microscope before the image it displays is sent over the network. "Focusing normally takes a bit of bandwidth if you're trying to do it remotely," he says. To help conserve network bandwidth, Mr. Morgan has begun experiments with "wavelets," which are mathematical techniques for analyzing images. Mr. Morgan says the idea is to derive numbers "that will tell us how sharp the image is" before sending it over the network to a remote location. "It's definitely an area that's interesting to students to work on," he says. Securing the microscope from network intruders is another problem yet to be solved. Security is a big issue, Mr. Morgan says. "It's slowing a lot of things down." Servers connected to the microscope have been "hacked," he adds, prompting him move the instrument's viewing and data-analysis servers onto a private network -- behind the Web server -- where they can be safeguarded. But these security concerns will be balanced against the university's desire "to bring this kind of technology to places where the cost is prohibitive" or where laboratory space or expertise are lacking, Ms. Lauzon says. A researcher needs "a computer and the connections to be able to handle the very large images," she says, "but nothing that's really not standard today." Ms. Lauzon says the microscopy center at Cal State's Hayward campus generates revenue from the fees it charges local biotechnology companies to use the microscope. The center uses the money to buy supplies like argon gas -- used in preparing samples for viewing under the microscope -- and to pay for maintenance. Students are among the microscope's other users -- for example, San Francisco State University students enrolled in a microscopy course rely on the center's remote-access Web site. "We have a mission to share the instrument," Mr. Morgan says. A National Science Foundation grant paid for the microscope, and even students with only standard Internet access can schedule viewing time on the machine. Students of all ages have a similar reaction to what Ms. Lauzon describes as the "incredible art and geometry" of insect parts magnified 3,000 to 12,000 times. "Very cool," she says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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