IU to host 3-day national Informatics conference

Prominent national and international scholars, educators and informaticians will come to IU this weekend for "Informatics: Defining the Research Agenda," a three-day conference from Sept. 10 through 12 that will define informatics, discuss its research and theorize where the field is heading in the upcoming decade.\nThe field, which studies information technology and its use, is still young. IU School of Informatics Dean J. Michael Dunn said in a press release that technology has grown so rapidly in the past years that our collection of data has exceeded our ability to handle it.\nLeading informaticians from the United Kindgom, Sweden and the U.S. are among those attending the conference.\n"Informatics is taking this seemingly unmanageable flood of data and transforming it into information that helps solve key problems in fields like medicine, genetics, chemistry, Internet security and engineering," Dunn said in the release.\nThe field of informatics has helped in the analysis of the Human Genome Project data and has been involved in writing software used for predictions the chemical structures of effective pharmaceutical drugs. \nDaniel Reed, director of the interdisciplinary Renaissance Computing Institute, which spans Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State Universities, will deliver an afternoon keynote address today.\nHis keynote is titled "Computing: An Intellectual Lever for Multidisciplinary Discovery."\nOther speakers will address developments in cybersecurity; medical, chemical and bio-informatics; human-computer interaction; and international communication networks through formal lectures and informal conversations, according to the press release.\nThe conference requires registration for the pre-conference workshop, keynote address and all sessions throughout the weekend.\nThe IU School of Informatics, now in its fourth year, was the nation's first such school. This year the IU-Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses brought on 21 new faculty members, including Larry Yaeger, an Apple Computer scientist and engineer who helped create the world's first personal digital assistant; Christopher Raphael, a professional oboist developing software that will recognize and analyze music; and Luis Mateus Rocha, the former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics Group.