Frequently asked questions about the Lab.

Please email InformaticsLab@cdc.gov with any new questions and we'll update this list to help others.

What kind of projects can I host in the Lab?

How do I start an engagement?

What is my engagement number?

How do I report a problem?

What is the Lab's service level agreement?

What Services does the Lab offer? / How can the Lab help my program / organization?

What kind of projects can I host in the Lab?

While the Lab is a CDC System, it is specifically built to support program use to temporarily experiment and test technology to determine how best to integrate it into existing or planned systems, processes and activities. Specific details on restrictions are described in the engagement form. Projects hosted within the Lab cannot:

  1. Contain or use sensitive information. All data used by an engagement must be non-sensitive and/or synthetic. Public data sets or publicly available data sets are allowed. The lab can help generate synthetic health/medical data sets if necessary.
  2. Be used within a production or clinical setting. Production systems should not depend on a Lab service in order to operate.
  3. Impact the performance of an existing production system. Lab projects should not adversely affect the performance of production systems.

How do I start an engagement (project)? How do I request access to the Lab's Resources?

To reserve time in the R&D Lab's physical collaboration space in 2500 Century Center, please send an Outlook calendar invite to InformaticsLab@cdc.gov.  In the invite, please include the following information:

  • The purpose of the meeting / session in the lab space
  • List of attendees
  • Specific Time and date(s) requested
  • Specific resources required for meeting (Mac workstation, CITGO access, audio, video, etc.)

For questions or consultation requests, please send an email to InformaticsLab@cdc.gov.

For other requests, please complete an engagement form and email it to InformaticsLab@cdc.gov. Your engagement will be reviewed. We'll email you back with either a timeline for when your resources will be available (typically 1-2 weeks) or to set up meeting for further discussion.

What is my engagement number?

When your engagement is approved, you will receive an email with a unique number to identify your engagement. Keep this number for future reference (we recommend sticky notes or saving the email in a safe place). If you forget, please email InformaticsLab@cdc.gov.

How do I report a problem? / I have a question about my engagement?

Please send an email to InformaticsLab@cdc.gov describing your problem or question. Please make sure to include a description of the problem, steps to recreate, what you were doing when the problem occurred, your engagement number and the name of your virtual machine.

I emailed you yesterday and haven't received a response.  What is the Lab's service level agreement?

The Lab is a resource provided by OSELS/PHSIPO to the CDC and the public health informatics community. We are a small group and cannot gaurantee a service level agreement. We try to answer all contact within a day, but this can be impacted by many other factors like annual/sick leave or other projects. The Lab runs on a single engineer - thus, depending on his workload, your response may take longer. Because of our limited resources, the Lab may be offline for scheduled maintenance. If you have a critically important event or demo, please let us know ahead of time (at least 1 week's notice) and we'll add it to the InformaticsLab@cdc.gov calendar and try to plan around it. The Lab does not offer phone support.

How does the Lab share information?

The Lab maintains an external web site not hosted by CDC.gov: www.phiresearchlab.org. This site serves as a collaboration locus for the Lab's interaction with the public health informatics research community. We share news items, brief reviews, project prototypes, lessons learned, structured evaluations and any other material that can be helpful to the public health informatics community. This site is maintained by the Informatics Research & Development Activity and content is created by Lab personnel or by guest authors from within the informatics community. The Lab also maintains a Twitter account at CDC_PHIRDL and a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CDCInformaticsLab. This web site was set up according to CDC web, communication, IT and security policies and was established via a waiver signed by the HHS Secretary, HHS CIO and CDC CIO. We maintain a non-cdc.gov web site due to the collaborative nature of the site and because content is created by community members. Please refer to the site's Disclaimer and Code of Conduct for more information.

How can I use the Lab's physical space?

The Lab maintains a dedicated, physical room in Century Center 2500 that is available for programs to use to collaborate in real-time for a variety of purposes. If you have a single event, please send a calendar invite to InformaticsLab@cdc.gov with your event details, but if you have an ongoing activity, please submit an engagement form describing how you would like to use the Lab. The Lab has 18 dedicated workstations available to use: 8 Windows workstations, 4 MacOSX workstations, 6 thin-client workstations and 1 SmartBoard. The Lab can comfortably seat 18 participants. The Lab has printing services and limited teleconferencing.

This space is useful for whatever your program may need. In the past it's been used by programs for:

  • Software development - Apple does not allow the virtualization of the MacOSX operating system. The Lab Mac workstations can be used to develop software that requires a Macintosh computer. Currently iPad/iPhone/iOS apps must be developed using tools that only run on MacOSX. In order to use 1-4 of the Lab's Macs, please set up an engagement and schedule time with others who may be using the Macs.
  • Demonstrations - showing off a web site or software tool.
  • Training - teaching small groups how to use a web site or software tool.
  • Collaboration - teams can meet to discuss and plan out an idea.
  • Usability Testing - focus groups can gather requirements or test how users access and use a web site or software tool.
  • Social Media Communication - a program uses the Lab to conduct Twitter / Facebook / etc campaigns to be able to easily compose, review and respond to interactions.

How can I use the Lab's virtual computers / virtual machines (VM)?

The Lab provides private cloud functions through the Applied Public Health Informatics Research Cloud using VMWare's virtualization software. This lets you request, use and access computer resources that we host, but you can access from your CDC workstation or any other computer that has Internet connectivity. The Lab currently supports Windows (Server2k12, Server2k16, Win10) and Linux  (CentOS, Ubuntu) operating systems, but we may be able to support other operating systems if you ask us. The Lab provides you with a standard install and administrator access so you can configure it to suite your engagement. The Lab has some limited software licenses for testing, so typically you will need to either purchase or provide a license in order to install it within the Lab. You can specify custom network configurations and test out your concept with as many VMs as you need, within reason.

Lab VMs are provided for free, but are available on a first come, first served basis depending on the current demand for resources. VMs are set up for 3-6 months and can be renewed if necessary.

Lab VM use generally falls into two categories:

  • Custom Desktops and Servers - you get a set of servers that you configure and use for purposes of your engagement. These custom VMs can be configured as necessary for your engagement.
  • Standard desktop - you gain access to a pre-existing Windows 10 desktop that you can use for limited software testing and external web site access. This desktop is limited and not customizable, but it is much quicker to set up.'


To request a VM you can go to https://cloud.phiresearchlab.org to request a VM within the IIU Lab.  There are multiple machine types out there with the basic OS, configured via standard security and your IIU account will have administrative access to the machine.  If you just need a temporary Desktop to maybe test a web page or some trial software you can go to https://view.phiresearchlab.org and get either a Windows 10 Temporary desktop or a CentOS7 Temporary desktop.

What development tools does the Lab provide?

Over the course of working with programs, we've identified and provide a few services that are useful for software development:

  • Issue Tracking through JIRA - hosted within the Lab
  • Wiki collaboration through Confluence - hosted within the Lab
  • Source code management through Github - hosted externally, but cleared for use within CDC

The Lab has a development portal at code.phiresearchlab.org that serves as a launchpad for available development tools. These tools are available for public health programs to help them develop informatics prototypes and test out software development. We have worked with the appropriate groups within CDC to clear these tools for use within the CDC environment. Some are hosted directly within the Lab and maintained by Lab personnel (Jira, Confluence) while some others are hosted by external partners (Github) and available for use as a third-party web application under HHS's rules and policies. Programs and groups are free to use other tools as appropriate for their needs, but the Lab provides these to reduce the resources that programs needs to exert on security, policy, IT review and support. There are many tools available for software development and these are not intended as a recommendation of what to use, but an example of what is available for use. As CDC and public health informatics infrastructure matures, it is expected that these development tools will graduate out of the Lab into a permanent, production location.

Issue tracking is provided through JIRA at http://code.phiresearchlab.org/jira. The Lab creates a project and grants them admin rights over the project to configure workflow, permissions, issue type, issue fields that is needed for their specific project. The default is for projects to be open to the public, but access can be restricted based on engagement need.

Wiki software is provided through Confluence at http://code.phiresearchlab.org/confluence. The Lab creates a space and grants them admin rights over the space to configure permissions, page layout, page structure and content.  The default is for pages to be open to the public, but access can be restricted based on engagement need. Some programs have had private pages that require log-in to view, but many allow the public to read, but specific logins to edit. The Lab uses Confluence for its own wiki at http://code.phiresearchlab.org/confluence/display/LAB and requires login permissions to edit a page. For user management, engagements manage user accounts through a manual process. We hope to improve this in the future. All content on the wiki must be non-sensitive and engagements must moderate content and remove anything that is inappropriate.

Source code is provided at https://github.com/informaticslab. The Lab uses Git through the Github.com product to share software projects using an open source license. Engagements can add their repository as a separate project under the InformaticsLab organization. All projects must be released under a compatible license (Apache, GPL, BSD, etc.) and cannot contain sensitive data. The Lab has worked with policy groups within CDC to write a brief review on open source that clear and confirm how open source can be used on government created and government sponsored projects. The Lab releases all of its prototypes under the Apache Software License 2.0, but programs must select their own license (open source or non-open source) as appropriate based on their specific needs.

Can the Lab help me with mobile development?

The Lab offers two services to help with mobile app development:

  • AppLab - hosting of beta versions of mobile apps (iPhone, iPad, Android) to facilitate testing with CDC and CDC partners. This site hosts the app files and allows them to be directly downloaded and installed onto mobile devices. This saves the time and effort required with manually copying apps onto specific devices based on device id.
  • Novel Devices Acquisition - the Lab can help CDC programs acquire and use novel devices for experimentation and testing. Before devices are officially approved by CDC, they can be acquired and managed by the Lab to allow programs to test processes, apps and techniques. Each device requires an engagement with the Lab and will abide by the Lab rules of behavior and code of conduct. Once the device is supported by CDC, the Lab helps to transition support using the appropriate, approved channels.

How does the Lab support external testing web sites?

Since the Lab hosts its own enclaved, external network we can assist programs with setting up temporary web sites that can be used for user outreach, usability testing, customer feedback and more. Each web site is set up as a separate engagement with its own dedicated virtual machine running the web server of the engagement's choice (most run IIS or Apache, but we have engagements running Tomcat, node.js, JBoss and many more web servers). Then a specific subdomain is created under phiresearchlab.org that will route traffic to the engagement's virtual server where it is handled according to the server configuration. For example, http://sample-engagement.phiresearchlab.org could be set up to support the testing of web service APIs or a new version of a web tool that requires access from external partners.

Each web site is managed by engagement staff according to the controls set up within their engagement form. To establish a lab testing site, please let InformaticsLab@cdc.gov know the name of your virtual machine, the name of your subdomain and what port you would like to use.

The Lab does not currently support SSL/TLS testing sites, but we expect to in the near future.

Can the Lab build my prototype?

The Lab has a limited team of developers and designers who may be able to work with you to create a prototype. While we create 1-2 prototypes each year, we work with many programs to help them prototype using their own teams.

Our developers and designers can work with your team to help you explore concepts and ideas through several levels of prototype maturity:

  • Visual Mockups - these non-functional prototypes are build in either low fidelity wireframes or high fidelity graphics and help programs explore the needed and desired functionality. These mockups help groups brainstorm about what is possible and what fits their user needs. Our user experience (UX) designer can help create mockups.
  • Functional Prototypes - these prototypes are partially developed in the app platform (mobile, web, server, etc.) with partial implementation to demonstrate how a tool will function. These prototypes help groups test functional concepts with small groups of beta testers. The source code built for these prototypes is frequently reused in later production releases. The Lab has had a few prototypes graduate out of prototype into a full-fledged tool in production use.

Please email InformaticsLab@cdc.gov if you need help prototyping a concept and you can meet with the Lab team to determine how best to proceed.


 

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