Dr. Michela Taufer, an AAAS Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist, holds the Dongarra Professorship in High-Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She earned her Laurea in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, and her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego and The Scripps Research Institute bridged computer systems and computational chemistry, underscoring her lifelong commitment to interdisciplinary research.
Throughout her career, Taufer has passionately combined computational and experimental sciences. Her cyberinfrastructure solutions utilize high-performance computing, cloud computing, and volunteer computing to advance scientific applications. An advocate for scientific rigor, she promotes reproducibility, replicability, and transparency across her projects. Taufer has held leadership roles in the HPC community, including serving as editor-in-chief of Future Generation Computer Systems and as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).
Presentation Title:
Enabling Autonomous Labs: The NSDF-ORNL Partnership for Real-Time Scientific Discovery
Presentation Abstract:
Autonomous labs are transforming scientific discovery by combining experimental steering, AI at the edge, real-time data movement, and in-situ decision making. Recent advances in these individual domains have made autonomous labs possible; however, the next major challenge is to break down disciplinary silos and build integrated ecosystems that make autonomous science accessible, scalable, and sustainable.
This talk highlights the successful collaboration between the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) and the INTERSECT initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), advancing real-time monitoring and steering of autonomous experiments. We present a modular, multi-service architecture integrating NSDF capabilities for message processing, live visualization dashboards, and persistent cloud storage. These services are actively deployed at ORNL and CHESS, supporting autonomous neutron diffraction, quantum materials workflows, flow chemistry, smart manufacturing, and energy systems. Designed for portability and scalability, NSDF’s containerized, Kubernetes-orchestrated infrastructure enables FAIR, AI-ready workflows that empower domain scientists, foster interdisciplinary research, and accelerate discovery through reusable and shareable data systems.