Informatics

About Informatics

The world is awash with information. In the last 5 years we've produced and recorded more information than in the previous 50,000 years; and almost all of this new information is digital. Informatics is about using computers to work with digital information - gathering, using, storing, retrieving, and visualising information and data. It's the study of tools and technologies to solve problems in all types of settings, like finance and economics, journalism, biology, health, engineering, communication.

 

Why study informatics?

Informatics can help organisations like banks work better by improving information flows, enable doctors to track the way a disease spreads through the population, and analyse social networks to understand how people relate and interact.

As an Informatics student you'll map the data from a global network of temperature sensors, or use linguistic modelling to try to understand how language has changed over the centuries, or track global trends in finance and cross-reference against off-the-wire news stories. You'll design web pages, build web applications with a simple but powerful programming language, and work with sophisticated graphics processing packages to solve practical information-based problems.

In Informatics, you'll integrate knowledge and concepts from computing, information modelling, human-computer interaction and graphics to unlock the power of information. Check out the Informatics Showcase for some real life examples.

 

First Year Informatics Package

Melbourne has introduced new first year subjects as the common starting point for IT majors and breadth sequences across the University (as well as the new concurrent Diploma of Informatics). These two subjects, Informatics-1: Practical Computing and Informatics-2: People, Data and the Web, are designed to enable students from any undergraduate degree* to learn how to use computers to collect, transform, visualise and interact with data and information from all over the world.