By David Bricker
As an academic field, it's still very young. But informatics -- the study of information technology and its use -- has already had a palpable effect on people's lives.
"In recent decades, technology has so enhanced our ability to gather data that the sheer volume of data now outstrips our capacity to deal with it," said Michael Dunn, dean of the IU School of Informatics. "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."
Already, Dunn said, informaticians have sped up the analysis of terabytes of Human Genome Project data and have written software that correctly predicts the chemical structures of effective pharmaceutical drugs.
Leading informaticians from the U.S., Sweden and the United Kingdom will come to the IU Bloomington campus to decide where their field should be going as part of a conference, "Informatics: Defining the Research Agenda," Sept. 10-12.
Daniel Reed, director of the Institute for Renaissance Computing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of President Bush's Information Technology Advisory Committee, will deliver the meeting's keynote address, "Computing: An Intellectual Lever for Multidisciplinary Discovery."
Other experts will give talks on the latest developments in cybersecurity, medical informatics, bioinformatics, chemical informatics, human-computer interaction, information technology in developing countries, international communication networks, and the use of computers in analyzing the aesthetic qualities of music.
A complete schedule of speakers and presentation titles can be found on the Web site at the end of this story.
The visitors will encounter a recently expanded school. Created in 2000, the IU School of Informatics was the nation's first. With this year's addition of 21 new faculty members to its IU Bloomington and IUPUI rosters, Dunn said his school is also making a bid to be the world's foremost.
"We are fortunate that some of the best informaticians in the world want to be at IU," Dunn said. "I believe our attractiveness can be credited to the excellence of our core faculty as well as the enthusiasm university and state leaders have for informatics in Indiana."
Among the notable new faculty are:
• Larry Yaeger, an Apple Computer distinguished scientist and software engineer who helped perfect handwriting recognition software used by the Apple Newton -- the world's first PDA
• Jean Camp and Markus Jakobsson, leading experts on cybersecurity and Internet privacy
• Christopher Raphael, a professional oboist (and soloist with the San Francisco Symphony) who is developing software that recognizes and analyzes music
• Alessandro Vespignani, a Wired magazine Rave Award nominee who studies the Internet and computer networks as living entities whose behavior can be parsed and predicted
• Luis Mateus Rocha, former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics Group
Funds derived from IU's "Commitment to Excellence" program will eventually support four of the 21 new informaticians, including Yaeger.

Schedule:
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/ra/program.asp