Science 2.0

Published by Alexy Khrabrov, June 26th, 2022

When we think about science of the future, we envision AI, robots, and all kinds of technology helping us understand the world better, from subatomic particles to living cells to organisms to planets and stars. But the scientific process itself remains fairly conservative, and often lags behind the collaborative environments where the modern AI itself is made. Here's how we envision the Open-Source Science of tomorrow.

In the morning, with your coffee, you check OSSci Hub, the global social network for science. You see the updates to all your OSS projects, the new papers from your collaborators, the new datasets, models, and ideas. You review the new Bundles -- the OSSci communication objects linking code, data, models, papers, ideas, and people -- and get inspiration from one of them. You review the idea of one of the people you saw around but have not worked with yet, and it resonates. You review their work and it's going in the same direction as yours. You reach out on chat, and quickly set up a meeting. You use the interactive IDE to sketch an experiment. A robotic lab is reserved using your OSSci grant and configured from your shared workspace. The experiment is conducted and the data is loaded back into the platform, with analytics kicking in. Once you see that the hypothesis holds, you validate it and write down a summary -- in a modern editor or LaTeX, which is still around in the year 3000 -- and the paper is born. A fdew days later it's finished, and a Reproducible Science Bundle is created -- with the robotic lab definitions, computational environment, the code, the models, the graphs, the tests, all encapsulated in a standard package deployable on any cloud platform you have (bring your own account, push a button).