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# System prepended metadata

title: 'IWBDA2020 Lab Automation 1.1: Testify'

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# 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.