Riya Bisht

Delusional Me- Tiles Research dream[2023]

One fine day while going through the internet, 18 yo I stumbled upon the word Citizen Scientist and I became very curious to find relevant resources to learn more about it. It was when I got to know about this NASA-designed/ organized open science program- Asteroid Hunting, the fact that even a high-school student can participate and contribute to the open science initiative by NASA. If you are someone who dreams like me contributing to science, understanding our universe, and solving mysteries we are surrounded by through technology then such programs give you a great initial head-start toward your quirky sci-fi dreams.

Today even after 3-4 years, when I look at their site. I am astonished to see the state of things that made the present geek in me sad and heartbroken as it did when I was 18 yo, it's their software that lacks accessibility to this date.

the site says the following in bold letters:

REQUIREMENTS: A Windows Machine

For god sake, Windows! I am a full-time Linux user. I wiped windows out of my hardware long back, since then I have wholeheartedly relied on my cute penguin to serve me daily tech tidbits and it never disappointed me, not even a bit. But why do these scientific applications have such nonsensical terms and conditions or in technical words → compatibility issues?

Scientific Community in general is not accessible. It is something that we can't deny, people out there holding such big designations as scientists, and researchers do not have enough time to think of these software and philosophical problems like accessibility but I feel it is the only thing that stops an amateur hacker like me to get into such endeavors at a first place.

The 18 yo me, blamed her hardware for not having enough specs. She wasn’t technically smart at that time to think beyond this argument.

We need to accept this:

It is a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Better to point it like this:

It is a philosophical problem, not a technical problem

We are making Scientific applications without really caring about philosophies like software accessibility. We can’t expect everyone to have a similar computing environment to operate and play with your software.

There has to be a universal solution. But here comes one argument, Is there something in technology yet that proves to be a Universal Solution to all problems?

Maybe not 100% true but proves to be one, BROWSERS. We are talking about accessibility, and how one can ignore the most accessible software out there. Browsers run on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, or any Operating environment.

But here comes another issue “There are software that can’t run on browsers because of different tech stack, Browsers support only JS”. If it were to be the early 2000s then this argument would be true but now when we already have seen the emergence of technology like Web Assembly. Running a heavy C++ stacked Photoshop application on top of the browser, sleek and smooth working without worrying about compatibility issues because of web assembly.

Our aim with Tiles Research is not just to run those heavy scientific applications on browsers but also to explore smarter and faster ways to run them. For that, we are incorporating the new Web APIs like Web GPU that proves to power our applications computations on GPU, Web Assembly, which compiles any systems language into a byte code that is supported by all major browsers[sooner or later, we will see it coming, don't worry], a little more futuristic, Web Transport, that will help us transport/distribute the compute over multiple devices if our host machine is not enough to handle the computation.

Resources:

2024 #

Now we have pivoted to a different methodology, check out the research thesis

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