The GEMSTONE team joined researchers from across the National Science Foundation’s Programmable Cloud Laboratories network at the PCLNet Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 24–25, 2026. The meeting brought together the network’s 20 funded teams to share their plans and explore opportunities to work together.
Convened by NSF, the Astera Institute, and the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, the two-day summit combined project presentations, posters, and discussions on the foundations of a connected laboratory network. Topics included AI, shared infrastructure, data standards, and researcher access to cloud laboratories.
GEMSTONE’s presentation and poster highlighted the project’s work toward translating written experimental protocols into instructions that automated laboratories can execute. At the center of this effort is AMBER, a shared workflow representation being developed to describe experiments independently of any one laboratory’s equipment or software. Together with AI tools for interpreting protocols and generating laboratory-specific instructions, it aims to make experimental methods easier to share and reuse.
The summit also provided an opportunity to discuss how these ideas could support collaboration across PCLNet. GEMSTONE is exploring common workflow representations that allow laboratories to exchange experimental methods while retaining their own execution systems. Follow-up discussions with other teams are helping identify candidate workflows and scientific questions for collaboration.
