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.