Dean, IU School of Informatics
|According to a study by P. Lyman
and H. R. Varian, humans produce between one and two exabytes of information
per year in print, film, optical and magnetic content. Roughly, that's
the textual content of 250 books for every man, woman and child on
If "information overload" is a cliche, it is only because
we are all too familiar from our own lives with what it means.
With increasing ease, new technologies enable the capture of staggering amounts of data. A biologist who once examined a gene and generated 10 data points now has the capability to examine 10,000 genes in the same, single experiment, yielding 10 million data points.
This wealth of information presents a challenge to researchers who must find new ways to manipulate and analyze their data, converting it to useful information and ultimately to knowledge. Every discipline is challenged by this widening information gap. More and more data are generated, but our ability to transform it to knowledge lags far behind.
Informatics is an emerging"metadiscipline" dedicated to spanning
the gap between information and its innovative application, empowering
people to find the appropriate application of technology to specific
problems. To do this requires a new disciplinespecific knowledge
intertwined with knowledge of information technology in a way that
integrates the two. Thus we have emerging "multidisciplines"
such as bioinformatics, chemical informatics, medical and health
informatics, geoinformatics, and new media, as well as research
areas focused on the commonalities of using large data sets, like
data mining and human-computer interaction.
Just as the academy responded to the agricultural age with land grant universities and schools of agriculture, and to the industrial age with schools of engineering, Indiana University is demonstrating an innovative response with its School of Informaticsthe first in the country.
(Editor's note: See the "Today's Feature" section
on today's gateway page of "IU Home Pages" to learn more
about the Indiana University School of Informatics.)