A common challenge I see in many lab environments is a limited understanding of what test equipment exists in the lab.  In the best case scenario, someone maintains a spreadsheet containing instrument model, vendor, serial number, calibration date, etc.  But let's face it:  maintaining an Excel file with what equipment is being used, what is gathering dust, what is being rented, what is being loaned out to a partner, etc.... is hard to keep up with, and will likely be inaccurate in the due course of time.  

GradientOne developed a feature to automate discovery and utilization of test equipment (you can read about our utilization feature here).   Customers simply install our Discovery agent on the same network as their lab.  Our Discovery agent subsequently monitors traffic and when it senses a new piece of test equipment on the network, it characterizes it, uploads information to the customer's GradientOne web portal, and allows the user to register the device for tracking and utilization.

Take a look at the below video that shows our Discovery feature in action.  
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How It Works
      Getting started is simple.  An engineer logs into their GradientOne web interface (Figure 1), registers a Test Rig with the following information:

• Test Rig Name
• Test Rig Type
• Location
• Lab
• Description

All of this information is indexed and made available for tracking, reporting, and trend analysis.

The Summary page (Figure 2) provides a global, comprehensive view of all Test Asset utilization information.  Filter and sort to customize views (Figure 3) based off test rig type, location, product line usage, and more.

View Test System utilization trends to plan for future purchases.  Figure 4 shows increasing weekly utilization of a test system, alerting Engineering management of the need to procure a new system, aligning capital expense with business demand.

Scheduling is integrated to book Test Rig use for your teams.  Test Engineers can check in/checkout test rigs.  Test Labs can book Test Rig time and allocate it to specific customer engagements.

I recently bought a berry crumble from Wal-Mart that didn't live up to my expectations: it had way too much sugar and no oatmeal or cake batter, so the entire crumble went into the compost after a few bites. Was it that I had confused crumble with cobbler? In order to prevent wasting another 5 dollars in the future, I did what any data scientist would do: run Principal Component Analysis on text-mined recipes from the internet. I formatted the data into a table, where the first column is whether either crumble or cobbler appears in the title, and then each column is either 1 or 0 for whether the word in the header appears in the recipe's text. I uploaded and ran PCA as described in a previous post. The scatterplot of component 1 vs component 2 looks like:

From the scatterplot, there's no clear distinction between the two, except for the cluster of cobblers on the lower right-hand side. The first component is able to separate a few cobblers from the rest of the recipes using the equation: 

pca1 = drink*0.120 +  alcoholic*0.103 + quail*0.081 + christmas*0.072 + liqueur*0.063 

Turns out there is a type of cocktail called a "cobbler", and that is what this first component is successfully separating out of the recipe set. The next component is: 

pca2 = bake*0.353 + fruit*0.333 + gourmet*0.307 + dessert*0.217

This component is pulling out that cobblers are slightly more likely to be baked than crumbles, and are more likely to contain fruit (as opposed to vegetables).  However, unlike the alcoholic cobblers, there's no clear dilineation between the two. But now that I've written the script for grabbing recipes and creating these tables, why not attempt to ask another thing I've wondered about - what is the difference between a lunch food and a breakfast food? Doing the same process, the scatterplot looks like:

It's possible to separate a lot of the lunch recipes from the breakfasts, but almost all the breakfasts overlap with the lunch space and so could be considered lunches. The first component is:

pca1 = oyster*0.390 + shrimp*0.365 + low cholesterol*0.240 + prune*0.208+ celery*0.202 + dried fruit*0.202 + parsley*0.149 + seafood*0.113 

So seafood and low-cholesterol are indicators of a recipe being a lunch food and not a breakfast food. This seems right; eggs are not a low-cholesterol food, and there are few breakfast foods that involve seafood. Unlike in the crumble vs cobbler example, this first component explains far more of the variance than the next components. 

PCA can explain similar questions across many domains. Instead of identifying the groups of ingredients that define one different types of food, you might be identifying the common words in the human-written feedback and descriptions of failures. Or, you might be looking at the space of all descriptions of other products to find new potential products, or products that may be most familiar. For example, we might take our knowledge that breakfasts don't have seafood to open a seafood restaurant that is open in the morning in order to take advantage of an untapped market.