1. Futures Lab: Biology Greenhouse gasses. Carbon-neutral fuels. Cleaning Waste Sites. All of these problems have possible solutions originating in the biology of micro-organisms. Those solutions require a quantitative understanding of biological systems as dynamical systems, both to understand the underlying science and to support engineering. These systems involve science ranging from the statistical mechanics of chemical systems, biochemistry, genetics, populations of cells, and up through biogeochemistry. This is integrative, multi-disciplinary science. In the Futures Lab, we are developing software that will support the integration of disparate scientific communities and we are building tools those communities can use to make these large-scale biological models. Biological Data Integration System Integration Architecture Multi-source Model Integration Visualization Integration Visualization is a powerful means for conceptual exploration of data. Work in the Futures Lab will allow community visualization tools, e.g., network layout engines and distributed rendering systems, to be brought together and presented to applications in a uniform, stable interface. Our work on advanced display technology and high performance computing joins with this to allow research into new ways to explore biological data when enormous numbers of pixels are combined with tera-flop visualization engines. Model building software presently available requires the user to input data by hand and/or from local files, homogeneous in format. Work in the futures lab is producing a model editor that can assemble data from multiple sources. … Advanced Production Network Resources Layer (e.g. computers, data systems, sensor networks, instruments) Competition Cooperation Collaboration Middleware and Services Integration Connectivity Communication Layer (e.g. security, transport, brokers, CAs, user support, services, hosting) Cooperation Collaboration … … … Applications and Community Tools Layer (e.g. sensor toolkits, simulation codes, etc.) Competition Cooperation Collaboration Software Infrastructure Loosely Coordinated Highly Coordinated Loosely Coordinated Value in Commonality and Stability, Ubiquity Value in Diversity Value in Innovation and Scale User Conceptual Integration Experience shows that software systems quickly become unwieldy to their users. When a scientist feels a program’s behavior is hard to predict, he distrusts the results. The best programs actually provide new means to conceptualize the problem solving process, providing a way to describe and analyze solutions. Work in the Futures Lab is explicating a concept-set for biological modeling and is expressing this in architecture. This provides a transition layer between a users view of the system to an application programmers view. Expressed as architecture, it constrains the systems design to be relevant and powerful for the user. The biological data needed to produce systems models are spread over many laboratories, are in incompatible formats, and suffer inconsistent nomenclature. Work in the Futures Laboratory will produce an architecture for distributed annotation, curration, and integration of fundamental data to vastly improve the power of comparative analysis. The biology community is distributed and diverse. It is unlikely that a single, overarching collaboration will be formed, yet the community must build integrated models. The Futures Lab is working on architectures that identify where there must be commonality to support the community and where there can be diversity.