MIT Ilabs Expand Access To African Universities

A program at MIT that offers remote access to instrumentation in its labs has grown to include universities in Africa. The iLab initiative began in 1998 when Jesus del Alamo, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, started developing tools that allow users to prepare experiments separate from lab equipment and then submit their tests to the equipment. In this way, experiments that take 20 minutes to set up but only 10 seconds to run, for example, only occupy the lab equipment for 10 seconds. As a result of del Alamo’s work, MIT’s lab resources became available to students working from dorms and to users in other countries. A grant from the Carnegie Corporation has led to the expansion of the program to several universities in Africa, which suffer from very high costs for Internet access. The iLabs model requires researchers to be connected to–and paying for–the Internet only while data is being transferred, not during the set up of their tests. Organizers of the project hope that it can serve as a model for other institutions. Steven Lerman, director of MIT’s Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, described a scenario in which institutions would purchase unique laboratory equipment, rather than buying what another school already has, and share access to the various unique resources.

Inside Higher Ed, 24 March 2006