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NIST and Your Office |
NIST's hidden roles in your office extend from the concrete and steel frame of the building to the ever more sophisticated information technologies that you use to get your job done. |
Turning your office building from a set of
blueprints into the physical structure that it is took tons of construction
materials and builders who knew what to do with those materials. The
Materials Science and Engineering
Laboratory and the Building and
Fire Research Laboratory are integral participants in these arenas.
Researchers in these two laboratories at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology develop information needed
to formulate and produce new materials and improve existing ones, help
establish building and safety codes, conduct economic analyses of different
construction practices, develop information and databases needed to
do all of these things--and that only scratches the surface.
EEEL's efforts center more on the parts of the communications infrastructure such as optical fibers and semiconductor devices by which data get from one place to another. ITL develops generic tests and test methods for the information technology systems that represent, encode, manipulate, display, transfer, and otherwise put information to use. ITL aims to help industry make these systems more usable, scalable, interoperable, and secure. In addition to the labs, the Advanced Technology Program has initiated several focused programs with industry in an effort to push the envelope of information technology in the arenas of health care, software development (and thereby the industries that use software), and multimedia communication: |
Once you enter your building and your office, there
is a good chance that during the next eight or more hours, you will
be searching for, retrieving, integrating, sending, and otherwise
juggling information with tools like the telephone and your computer.
This is where NIST's