# IWBDA2020 Lab Automation 1.1: Testify [TOC] ## Testify <p style="font-size: 0.9rem;font-style: italic;"><img style="display: block;" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Icon_DINA_Voraussetzungen_Digitale_Nachhaltigkeit_03_Semantische_Daten_Farbig.svg" alt="File:Icon DINA Voraussetzungen Digitale Nachhaltigkeit 03 Semantische Daten Farbig.svg"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64115050">"File:Icon DINA Voraussetzungen Digitale Nachhaltigkeit 03 Semantische Daten Farbig.svg"</a><span> by <a href="https://jonopprecht.com/">Jon Opprecht https://jonopprecht.com/</a></span> is licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en?ref=ccsearch&atype=html" style="margin-right: 5px;">CC0 1.0</a><a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en?ref=ccsearch&atype=html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="display: inline-block;white-space: none;margin-top: 2px;margin-left: 3px;height: 22px !important;"><img style="height: inherit;margin-right: 3px;display: inline-block;" src="https://search.creativecommons.org/static/img/cc_icon.svg" /><img style="height: inherit;margin-right: 3px;display: inline-block;" src="https://search.creativecommons.org/static/img/cc-cc0_icon.svg" /></a></p> **Alexis Casas and Jeremy Cahill** ## Introducing Testify - Testify is the human-first system for laboratory automation protocols. - Today, researchers around the world suffer from a disconnect. - There is an expressive gap between lab protocols-as-prose and protocols-as-code. - Doing the same work on different lab devices often requires recoding the same instructions. - Testify bridges that gap. - It enables researchers to write automation protocols in plain language. ## Goals Testify's key goals are two-fold. 1. Improve lab automation portability and interoperability *today*. - Testify aims to enable semantic, platform-agnostic coding of lab automation. - This opens the door to protocols with code as a first-class citizen. 2. Lock in these gains for *tomorrow*. - Research playbooks written now should be runnable tomorrow or in 1000 years. - Open access to scientific knowledge relies on *fixity*, the property of sameness over time. - Lab protocols published today often become unreproducible within years. - We can futureproof our work by humanizing our description of it. ## Deliverables - A research taxonomy derived from scientific literature. - A domain-specific language for natural-language specification of lab automation procedures. - An abstraction layer for writing device drivers that map device APIs with the DSL.