In 1956, the German informatician Karl Steinbuch and engineer Helmut Gröttrup coined the word Informatik when they developed the Informatik-Anlage[13] for the Quelle mail-order management, one of the earliest commercial applications of data processing. In April 1957, Steinbuch published a paper called Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung ("Informatics: Automatic Information Processing").[14] The morphology—informat-ion + -ics—uses "the accepted form for names of sciences, as conics, mathematics, linguistics, optics, or matters of practice, as economics, politics, tactics",[15] and so, linguistically, the meaning extends easily to encompass both the science of information and the practice of information processing. The German word Informatik is usually translated to English as[16]computer science by universities or computer science & engineering by technical universities (German equivalents for institutes of technology). Depending on the context, informatics is also translated into computing, scientific computing or information and computer technology. The French term informatique was coined in 1962 by Philippe Dreyfus.[17] In the same month was also proposed independently by Walter F. Bauer (1924–2015) and associates who co-founded software company Informatics Inc. The term for the new discipline quickly spread throughout Europe, but it did not catch on in the United States. Over the years, many different definitions of informatics have been developed, most of them claim that the essence of informatics is one of these concepts: information processing, algorithms, computation, information, algorithmic processes, computational processes or computational systems.[18][1]
The earliest uses of the term informatics in the United States was during the 1950s with the beginning of computer use in healthcare.[19] Early practitioners interested in the field soon learned that there were no formal education programs, and none emerged until the late 1960s. They introduced the term informatics only in the context of archival science, which is only a small part of informatics. Professional development, therefore, played a significant role in the development of health informatics.[19] According to Imhoff et al., 2001, healthcare informatics is not only the application of computer technology to problems in healthcare, but covers all aspects of generation, handling, communication, storage, retrieval, management, analysis, discovery, and synthesis of data information and knowledge in the entire scope of healthcare. Furthermore, they stated that the primary goal of health informatics can be distinguished as follows: To provide solutions for problems related to data, information, and knowledge processing. To study general principles of processing data information and knowledge in medicine and healthcare.[20][21] The term health informatics quickly spread throughout the United States in various forms such as nursing informatics, public health informatics or medical informatics. Analogous terms were later introduced for use of computers in various fields, such as business informatics, forest informatics, legal informatics etc. These fields still mainly use term informatics in context of library science.
In the early 1980s, K.A Nicholas published "Informatics: Ready for the Information Society" proposing a definition of Informatics as "the study and the practice of skills related to information, its collection, storage, retrieval, analysis and publication. In short; - Information Handling." It had been developed in the South Australian Education System at a grass roots level. <K.A Nicholas published "Informatics: Ready for the Information Society" 1983 - National Library of Australia>
In the early 1990s, K.K. Kolin proposed an interpretation of informatics as a fundamental science that studies information processes in nature, society, and technical systems.[22]
A broad interpretation of informatics, as "the study of the structure, algorithms, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems," was introduced by the University of Edinburgh in 1994. This has led to the merger of the institutes of computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science into a single School of Informatics in 2002.[23]
Supplementary to matter and energy, information is the third essence for modeling the world. Cognitive informatics focuses on internal information processing mechanisms and the natural intelligence of the brain.
Informatics as a fundamental science of information in natural and artificial systems was proposed again in Russia in 2006.[25]
The old definition of computer science - the study of phenomena surrounding computers - is now obsolete. Computing is the study of natural and artificial information processes.
The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, of the UK Funding Councils, includes a new, Computer Science and Informatics, unit of assessment (UoA),[27] whose scope is described as follows:
The UoA includes the study of methods for acquiring, storing, processing, communicating and reasoning about information, and the role of interactivity in natural and artificial systems, through the implementation, organisation and use of computer hardware, software and other resources. The subjects are characterised by the rigorous application of analysis, experimentation and design.
In the fields of geoinformatics or irrigation informatics, the term -informatics usually mean information science, in context related to library science. This was the first meaning of informatics introduced in Russia in 1966 by A.I. Mikhailov, R.S. Gilyarevskii, and A.I. Chernyi, which referred to a scientific discipline that studies the structure and properties of scientific information.[22] In this context, the term was also used by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. Some scientists use this term, however, to refer to the science of information processing, not data management.[28]
In the English-speaking world, the term informatics was first widely used in the compound medical informatics, taken to include "the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including information science and the technology to support these tasks".[29] Many such compounds are now in use; they can be viewed as different areas of "applied informatics".
Informatics as computer science
In some countries such as Germany, Russia, France, and Italy, the term informatics in many contexts (but not always) can translate directly to computer science.[30]
Related topics
Computer scientists study computational processes and systems. Computing Research Repository (CoRR) classification distinguishes the following main topics in computer science (alphabetic order):[31][32][33]
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines to applied disciplines.
Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation.
Bio-inspired computing, short for biologically inspired computing, is a field of study which seeks to solve computer science problems using models of biology. It relates to connectionism, social behavior, and emergence. Within computer science, bio-inspired computing relates to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Bio-inspired computing is a major subset of natural computation.
The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no commonly accepted definition of computational intelligence.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich.
Neuroinformatics is the emergent field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian-American computer scientist, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data science, causal inference, knowledge representation, bioinformatics and health informatics researcher and professor.
Karl W. Steinbuch was a German computer scientist, cyberneticist, and electrical engineer. He was an early and influential researcher in German computer science, and was the developer of the Lernmatrix, an early implementation of artificial neural networks. Steinbuch also wrote about the societal implications of modern media.
The term Engineering Informatics may be related to information engineering, computer engineering, or computational engineering, among other meanings. This word is used with different context in different countries. In general, some people assume that the central area of interest in informatics is information processing within man-made artificial (engineering) systems, called also computational or computer systems. The focus on artificial systems separates informatics from psychology and cognitive science, which focus on information processing within natural systems. However, nowadays these fields have areas where they overlap, e.g. in field of affective computing.
Informatics is the study of the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and engineered computational systems.
George V. Cybenko is the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and a fellow of the IEEE and SIAM.
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist.
Ümit V. Çatalyürek is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and adjunct professor in department of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University. He is known for his work on graph analytics, parallel algorithms for scientific applications, data-intensive computing, and large scale genomic and biomedical applications. He was the director of the High Performance Computing Lab at the Ohio State University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to combinatorial scientific computing and parallel computing.
Antonio Lieto is an Italian cognitive scientist and computer scientist at the University of Salerno and a Research Associate at the Institute of High Performance Computing of the Italian National Research Council focusing on cognitive architectures and computational models of cognition, commonsense reasoning and models of mental representation, and persuasive technologies. He teaches Artificial Intelligence and "Design and Evaluation of Cognitive Artificial Systems" at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin.
↑ Denning, Peter J.; Rosenbloom, Paul (2009). The Profession of IT Computing: The Fourth Great Domain of Science. Association for Computing Machinery. OCLC981466101.
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