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Informatics ….
• The Age of Informatics
• What is Informatics?
• Why is Informatics of special interest to our Region?
• Who should care about Informatics?
•What are we doing about Informatics?
• How does Informatics affect our workforce?
The Age of Informatics!
Over our 3 + million years of existence, humans have undergone several fundamental transformations. We learned to talk, allowing us to easily convey ideas and knowledge to others. We learned to grow our food instead of hunting it, allowing us to settle in camps and towns and mega-cities. We learned to write down our thoughts so our knowledge could easily spread throughout the world. And, everyone alive today is part of our fourth transformation, which may be greater than all the others combined!
In the past if we wanted to build a Pyramid or a Panama Canal, we pulled together an army of architects and engineers and scratched our ideas on paper, over and over, until we thought we had it right. We had all kinds of tools to help us build things but we did the designing largely in our heads. As projects became bigger, the design effort became harder, in large part because of the volumes of data we had to deal with.
These earlier transformations took thousands of years to accomplish.
Over the last fifty years we have evolved sophisticated new tools - we call them computers - to help us:
think about and evolve complex concepts and designs,
simulate and test them before implementing them and then
ensure they operate correctly.
Think back about how much we have learned about ourselves and our universe since the 1950s and how fast new ideas and concepts are emerging every day. We’re not any smarter than our parents were 50 years ago; we’ve just entered The Age of Informatics!
Next: What is Informatics?
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