Assignment: Using Informatics

Assignment: Using Informatics

Assignment: Using Informatics

Reflect on your own practice. Discuss how informatics is used in your practice. What is your primary area where you would use informatics?Informatics studies the representation, processing, and communication of
information in natural and engineered systems. It has computational, cognitive
and social aspects. The central notion is the transformation of information –
whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artifacts.
Understanding informational phenomena – such as computation, cognition, and
communication – enables technological advances. In turn, technological progress
prompts scientific enquiry. The science of information and the engineering of
information systems develop hand-in-hand. Informatics is the emerging discipline
that combines the two.
In natural and artificial systems, information is carried at many levels, ranging, for
example, from biological molecules and electronic devices through nervous
systems and computers and on to societies and large-scale distributed systems.
It is characteristic that information carried at higher levels is represented by
informational processes at lower levels. Each of these levels is the proper object
of study for some discipline of science or engineering. Informatics aims to
develop and apply firm theoretical and mathematical foundations for the features
that are common to all computational systems.
THE SCOPE OF INFORMATICS
In its attempts to account for phenomena, science progresses by defining,
developing, criticising and refining new concepts. Informatics is developing its
own fundamental concepts of communication, knowledge, data, interaction and
information, and relating them to such phenomena as computation, thought, and
language.
Informatics has many aspects, and encompasses a number of existing academic
disciplines – Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Computer Science.
Each takes part of Informatics as its natural domain: in broad terms, Cognitive
Science concerns the study of natural systems; Computer Science concerns the
analysis of computation, and design of computing systems; Artificial Intelligence
plays a connecting role, designing systems which emulate those found in nature.
Informatics also informs and is informed by other disciplines, such as
Mathematics, Electronics, Biology, Linguistics and Psychology. Thus Informatics
provides a link between disciplines with their own methodologies and
perspectives, bringing together a common scientific paradigm, common
engineering methods and a pervasive stimulus from technological development
and practical application.