Emerald Cloud Lab Makes Programming Language for Conducting Remote Scientific Experiments Open Source

The world's largest cloud lab provides open access to its previously proprietary Symbolic Lab Language (SLL), allowing researchers to leverage the most widely used computational language for remotely conducting scientific experiments.

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL), the first and leading highly automated cloud laboratory, today announced the company's proprietary Symbolic Lab Language (SLL) will now be open source for research use. This will allow scientists and entrepreneurs from around the world to utilize the industry's most robust and established programming language for remotely conducting scientific experiments in a cloud lab and build upon it to help foster an open science ecosystem. 

ECL is a longtime supporter of open science, the principle and practice—and multi-US Federal agency initiative—of making research products and processes available to all while fostering collaboration, reproducibility, and equity. ECL made its SLL open source to further support the mission of open science by removing access barriers and accelerating the use of cloud labs for scientific research across multiple industries spanning pharmaceuticals, biotech, food and beverage, consumer products, and materials science.

"We believe making SLL open source will make it easier for the scientific community to adopt highly automated cloud labs and hopefully share their data using open science principles," said Dr. Brian Frezza, Co-founder and Co-CEO at ECL. "This will expand the cloud lab ecosystem by providing entrepreneurs with a standardized language that can be leveraged to create new protocols and add new capabilities to aid scientists with their research."

The SLL programming language has been developed and refined by ECL for over a decade. It has been used to conduct more than 600,000 experiments on over 230 unique scientific instruments. SLL is generally considered the most developed and widely used language for remotely controlling experiments in a cloud lab.

This quarter ECL is also bringing its new state-of-the-art cloud lab facility, located in Austin, Texas, online. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is also nearing the completion of the world's first academic cloud lab.

"The importance of open source software for advancing open science has been mentioned and reinforced by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and multiple federal funding agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation," said Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for digital infrastructure, University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University. "ECL's laudable decision to release SLL as open source reflects their commitment to supporting the Year of Open Science and establishes their leadership position in connecting automated science facilities with open science. Their decision will be critical towards the development of national networks of open, automated science facilities."

About Emerald Cloud Lab
ECL was founded by scientists, for scientists. Our vision is to build a system that sweeps aside the daily grind scientists face in the laboratory and allows the day-to-day work to center on orchestrating science. There is transformative potential in a world where scientific ideas have a more direct route to realization and progress in science and medicine is driven more by the strength of our ideas than our labor in the lab. Succeeding in this mission has the chance to provide unprecedented leverage and autonomy to scientists worldwide and in doing so to accelerate the rate of progress in pharmaceutical research, materials science, medical diagnostics, and agriculture.

SOURCE Emerald Cloud Lab