Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Fusion Engineering and Design 83 (2008) 476–479 Communications fabric for scientific collaboration J. Stillerman a,* , D. Baron b , T. Fredian a , M. Greenwald a , H. Schulzrinne c a MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, NW17-268 Cambridge, MA 02139, USA b MIT Information Services & Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA c Columbia University Computer Science Department, New York, NY 10027, USA Received 30 May 2007; received in revised form 28 August 2007; accepted 30 August 2007 Available online 1 November 2007 Abstract Today’s fusion experiments are geographically and institutionally dispersed collaborations. This makes the need for good remote collaboration tools particularly acute. Informal interactions between scientists are particularly important and hard to realize with traditional communications approaches. We are testing existing packages based on the IETF SIP (session initiation protocol) standard and integrating them into our applications to address these issues. Development of additional tools may be needed to provide better integration and enhanced functionality. By providing a spectrum of tools encompassing instant messaging, voice, video, presence, event notification and application sharing, we hope to overcome technical hurdles and a natural reluctance, among researchers, to interact with colleagues who are not on site. Existing web pages, which support integrated and shared workspaces, such as electronic logbooks, code and experimental run management, records of presentations and publications, personnel databases, and physical site maps will be ‘communications enabled’, so that just as currently there are ‘mailto’ links we will be able to have ‘speak to:’, ‘instant message to:’, ‘video to:’, and ‘share with:’ links. Mechanisms will be provided for session portability; a conference might be moved from a hard phone to a soft phone so that video or application sharing could be enabled. This paper discusses our ongoing efforts in these areas, including a prototype implementation of some of these tools. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Remote collaboration; VoIP; SIP; Event notification; Conferencing; Presence 1. Introduction As fusion experiments become larger and more expensive to build and operate, they are being designed, constructed and operated by collaborations between geographically and institu- tionally dispersed groups. This trend is continuing with ITER being a multi-national collaboration between seven parties scat- tered around the world. The conduct of these experiments is inherently collaborative, both informal and formal. When all of the parties are on site, meetings and seminars facil- itate formal collaboration. Scheduled videoconferences have become a regular and effective way to include off-site collab- orators in these meetings. Informal collaboration takes place when and wherever people meet, before and after meetings, in the hallways, and in shared workspaces like an experi- ment’s control room. These informal discussions are critical * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 617 253 8176. E-mail addresses: jas@psfc.mit.edu, jas@mit.edu (J. Stillerman). to this research, and are very hard to achieve in a distributed environment. To date, solutions have ranged from telephones and video- conferences all the way to continuous presence systems like AccessGrid [1]. While these tools help, they have not been suc- cessful in enabling the free flow of information and ideas that takes place in a physically shared environment. This is due to several factors: Formality. When using these tools for business commu- nications, etiquette tends to dictate that participants restrict their conversations to the agreed upon topics of discussion to minimize “wasted” time. Unfortunately, this discourages ram- bling peripheral conversations that often lead to significant innovation. Intrusiveness. ‘I would call them to tell them that their diag- nostic is broken, but I don’t want to disturb them’. Even more the case: ‘I would call them to tell them that their data is inter- esting, or anomalous, but I don’t want to disturb them.’ Since most of these tools require the full attention of the participants during the period the tool is being used, there is a reluctance to 0920-3796/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.fusengdes.2007.08.025