In 1957 the German computer scientist Karl Steinbuch coined the word Informatik by publishing a paper called Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung ("Informatics: Automatic Information Processing"). The term was coined as a combination of "information" and "automatic" to describe the science of automating information processing.
Informatics is the study of information and the ways information is used by and affects human components in a certain application. The term "information" comes with a certain application of computer systems. Given an application App, App-Informatics investigates the storage, update, and retrieval of the application's information. In the English-speaking world the term informatics was first widely used in medical informatics through the 80's, taken to include the study of computer-based information processing for better medical practice, education, and research. In recent years, the term informatics is found in many emerging compounds, including Bio-informatics, Geo-informatics, Legal-informatics, Energy-informatics, etc. Informatics also represents the service and inter-disciplinary aspects of Computer Science, Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, and Civil Engineering. For example, Bio-informatics is broadly defined to be the study of information in biology, but often mean storage, update, retrieval, and use of genomic information in practice, which is in line with the current trends and developments in the application domain.
The Informatics Laboratory is located in Building 42, Room 101W. Currenlty, the lab is hosting NSF sponsored inter-disciplinary research projects in Cyber-informatics and Civil-informatics.
Byunggu Yu, Ph.D.
Director of the Informatics Laboratory,