The US National Academies has just released an important report on the implications and promises of automated research workflows on scientific discovery. These workflows combine computation, lab automation, and machine learning/AI in various ways that are having transformational impact on research in various disciplines. The committee that authored the report was chaired by University of Michigan Professor Emeritus Dan Atkins, who is well known to the CNI community for the "Atkins report" on Cyberinfrastructure, his work as the first director of the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and as a recipient of the Paul Evan Peters award in 2008. For the report, see

Automated Research Workflows for Accelerated Discovery

The needs and demands placed on science to address a range of urgent problems are growing. The world is faced with complex, interrelated challenges in which the way forward lies hidden or dispersed across disciplines and organizations. For centuries, scientific research has progressed through iteration of a workflow built on experimentation or observation and analysis of the resulting data. While computers and automation technologies have played a central role in research workflows for decades t...

for a summary press release, see

Automated Research Workflows Are Speeding Pace of Scientific Discovery; New Report Offers Recommendations to Advance Their Development

Automated research workflows — which integrate computation, laboratory automation, and tools from artificial intelligence — have the potential to increase the speed of research activities and accelerate scientific discovery. A new report recommends ways to advance their development.

CNI continues to track developments in this area closely; I invite you to to consider this report in context of the Carnegie Mellon Cloud Lab work that we highlighted in our December 2021 Member meeting (video is available via the CNI web site) for example. Often, the National Academies does a webinar in conjunction with the release of a report like this, but thus far, I am not aware of one having been scheduled; if I get information on such a presentation, I'll post it here.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI