User-friendly Workflow Specification Tools for VAILabs

Develop user-friendly tools for specifying VAILabs workflows that enable researchers to define, edit, and visualize modular pipelines with minimal technical burden while preserving reproducibility and transparency.

Background

VAILabs relies on an XML-based workflow description to orchestrate experiments, aiming to be accessible to both programmers and non-programmers. However, the authors acknowledge that designing effective user interfaces and tools for specifying complex workflows is a concrete unresolved difficulty in the community.

Addressing this challenge is essential for broad adoption across domains, reducing barriers to digitizing laboratory processes and enabling consistent, adaptive experimentation with human-in-the-loop control.

References

The framework exposes many of the concrete difficulties that remain unsolved in the community, such as designing user-friendly tools for specifying workflows and ensuring semantic compatibility across modules.

— Virtual Laboratories: Domain-agnostic workflows for research (2507.06271 - Sevilla-Salcedo et al., 8 Jul 2025) in Section 5 (Discussion)