Digital Scientific Notations as a Human-Computer Interface in Computer-Aided Research
This addresses the issue of transparency in computer-aided research for scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interface concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of black-box scientific software causing mistakes by analyzing human-computer interaction in research and identifies digital scientific notations as a key interface solution, with a proof-of-concept implementation for mathematical equations.
Most of today's scientific research relies on computers and software not only for administrational tasks, but also for processing scientific information. Examples of such computer-aided research are the analysis of experimental data or the simulation of phenomena based on theoretical models. With the rapid increase of computational power, scientific software has integrated more and more complex scientific knowledge in a black-box fashion. As a consequence, its users do not know, and don't even have a chance of finding out, which models or assumptions their computations are based on. The black-box nature of scientific software has thereby become a major cause of mistakes. The present work starts with an analysis of this situation from the point of view of human-computer interaction in scientific research. It identifies the key role of digital scientific notations at the human-computer interface, and describes a proof-of-concept implementation of such a digital scientific notation for scientific models formulated as mathematical equations.