Not a week has gone by in the last four years where I didn’t have to try and explain what Informatics is. For starters, it’s my major and it’s awesome. If you come off as the type of person who isn’t on Facebook and thinks a Nokia 3310 does the trick, I’ll probably tell you that informatics is “computers and stuff”. For people who seem more interested or in a professional setting, I’ll tell you informatics is applying information technology to other fields of study like biology, telecommunications, or business.

Still, this doesn’t always satisfy people’s curiosity most times about what you actually do with informatics. Last week I came across two real world examples of how you can use informatics in real life to solve real world problems. I hope to continue this “series”  as I find more real world implementations of informatics to help explain to the layman what it’s all about.

Forming Groups in Class

The first example comes from my Search Informatics class where every student is building their own search engine. As part of the most recent assignment, each student had to find three other students to evaluate their engine and return the favor for three other students.

I wrote a simple Perl script to match up everyone with three peers to evaluate that also made sure everyone was evaluated three times. We could have counted off in class or emailed each other a few times to work it out, but it was easier to let the computer do the work. Here’s the script and the output:

my @peers = ('Nurzhan', 'Max', 'Matt', 'Andrew', 'Dmitriy', 'Tom');
my @tempPeers = @peers;
foreach my $p (@peers) {
my @evals = ();
for(my $i=1; $i<=3; $i++) {
push(@evals, $tempPeers[-$i]);
}
push(@tempPeers,shift(@tempPeers));
print "$p evaluates ", join(', ',@evals), "\n";
}

It outputs:

Nurzhan evaluates Tom, Dmitriy, Andrew
Max evaluates Nurzhan, Tom, Dmitriy
Matt evaluates Max, Nurzhan, Tom
Andrew evaluates Matt, Max, Nurzhan
Dmitriy evaluates Andrew, Matt, Max
Tom evaluates Dmitriy, Andrew, Matt

Simple, effective, and probably earned me some brownie points with the professor. I posted this to the class forum and everyone liked the idea and used it.

Critiquing Flyers and Posters

The second example I came across on Twitter from Jay Steele, a HCI/d master student. A couple of his fellow peers posted some design critiques around a poster hung in the hallway of their design lab. On a college campus, there are fliers and posters everywhere so if you want to get any sort of response from people (i.e. show up at your event, join your club, vote for your candidate, etc.) you need to design it properly.

These subtle, often overlooked, details could transform this boring posting that’s probably being ignored to something that makes people want to, in this case ironically, enter a poster design contest.

These two simple examples from last week will hopefully help people better understand what you actually do with informatics. Letting a computer properly match up students for a group assignment saved everyone the time and effort of organizing and error checking by hand to make sure everyone was covered. The HCI/d master students had a little fun by offering some truly constructive criticism that could help make this poster stand out to people passing by.