The System is the Sensor . . . and it ’ s Closed - loop

Overview: Science is arguably the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, yet the scientific discovery process itself remains an art. Human intuition and experience are still the driving forces of the high-level discovery process: we determine which hypotheses and theories to entertain, which experiments to conduct, how data should be interpreted, when hypotheses should be abandoned, and so on. Meanwhile machines are limited to low-level tasks such as gathering and processing data. While this arrangement may have sufficed in the past century, today largescale networked systems are a major scientific focus. The complexity and high-dimensionality of these systems makes it incredibly difficult for humans alone to manage and optimize the process of science. A grand challenge for scientific discovery in the 21st century is to devise machines that directly participate in the high-level discovery process.