WHAT IS AN informatics degree, and why?

These are questions that have been posed to us on

From Computer Science to Informatics

Computing provides the foundation for science, industry, and ultimately for the success of society.
Computing education traditionally has focused on a set of core technological and theoretical
concepts, and teaching these concepts remains critically important. Meanwhile, advances in
computing occur and are driven by the need to solve increasingly complex problems in domains
outside traditional computer science. Students, teachers, and scholars in other fields are keenly
interested in computational thinking, and computing itself increasingly is informed by the
challenges of other disciplines. For example, to design good online auction technology, computer
scientists found that they needed to understand how humans would select bidding strategies
given the system design, and indeed how to design the system to motivate certain types of
behavior (truthful value revelation, for example). This co-design problem led to fruitful
interdisciplinary collaborations between computer scientists, economists and, increasingly, social
psychologists. Likewise, designing successful technology for trust, privacy, reputation, and sharing
in social computing environments requires both computer science and behavioral science. These
interactions between problem domain context and computational design are characteristic of the
maturing of computer science. Computing is no longer owned solely by computer science, any
more than statistics is owned solely by faculty in statistics departments. Computing and
computational thinking have become ubiquitous, and embedded in all aspects of science,
research, industry, government, and social interaction. Consider the flurry of excitement about “e-
commerce” in the late 1990s. Quickly e-commerce moved from being seen as a new field to being
absorbed in “commerce”: the study of business communications, logistics, fulfillment, and
strategy, for which the Internet and computing were just two technologies in a complex
infrastructure. How then does computing education need to change to respond to the new reality,
and more importantly, to be equipped to respond to future developments? We must embrace the
diversity of ways in which problems are solved through the effective use of computing, and we
must better understand the diverse problem domains themselves. The vision for informatics
follows from the natural evolution of computing. The success of computing is in the resolution of
problems, found in areas that are predominately outside of computing. Advances in computing—
and computing education—require greater understanding of the problems where they are found:
in business, science, and the arts and humanities. Students must still learn computing, but they
must learn it in contextualized ways. This, then, provides a definition for informatics: informatics is
a discipline that solves problems through the application of computing or computation, in the
context of the domain of the problem. Broadening computer science through attention to
informatics not only offers insights that will drive advances in computing, but also more options
and areas of inquiry for students, which will draw increasing numbers of them to study
computation.

INFORMATICS PROGRAMS

Computer science is focused on the design of hardware and software technology that provides
computation. Informatics, in general, studies the intersection of people, information, and
technology systems. It focuses on the ever-expanding, ubiquitous, and embedded relationship
between information systems and the daily lives of people, from simple systems that support
personal information management to massive distributed databases manipulated in real time. The
field helps design new uses for information technology that reflect and enhance the way people
create, find, and use information, and it takes into account the strategic, social, cultural, and
organizational settings in which those solutions will be used. In the U.S., informatics programs
emerged over the past decade, though not always under the informatics name, and often in
different flavors that bear the unique stamp of their faculty. Prominent examples include
“Informatics” (Indiana University, University of Michigan, University of Washington, UC Irvine),
“Human Computer Interaction” (Carnegie Mellon University), “Interactive Computing” (Georgia
Tech), “Information Technology and Informatics” (Rutgers), and “Information Science and
Technology” (Penn State). Some programs emerged primarily from computer science roots; others
from information and social science roots. They do all generally agree on the centrality of the
interaction of people and technology, and thus regardless of origin they are multidisciplinary and
focus on computation in human contexts. Informatics is fundamentally an interdisciplinary
approach to domain problems, and as such is limited neither to a single discipline nor a single
domain. This is evident in another type of diversity in such programs: some take a fairly broad
approach, with several distinct tracks or application domains, which can range as widely as art and
design, history, linguistics, biology, sociology, statistics and economics. Other programs are limited
to a single application domain, such as bioinformatics (for example, Iowa State, Brigham Young,
and UC Santa Cruz). Thus, informatics programs can have as many differences as they have
commonalities. This has been reflected in some confusion and frustration about how to establish a
community of interest. For example, there is an “iSchool” caucus (about 27 members), and a
partially overlapping CRA (IT) Deans group (about 40 members). To illustrate some of the issues,
we will describe two of the broader programs with which we are most familiar. The School of
Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington offers a traditional CS degree and an
informatics degree, which was first offered in 2000. Its informatics curriculum is focused along
three dimensions that are first presented in an introductory course: foundations, implications, and
applications. Unlike most traditional computer science curricula, the introductory course does not
focus on programming as the sole problemsolving paradigm. Instead, a number of skills, concepts,
and problem solving techniques are introduced and motivated by context-based problems,
including logical reasoning, basic programming, teamwork, data visualization, and presentation
skills. Following this introduction, foundations courses include discrete math and logical reasoning,
a two-course programming sequence, and a course on data and information representation, while
implications courses include social informatics and human computer interaction. The foundations
topics are similar to those in a computer science program; however, the ordering is quite different,
in that programming comes last rather than first. This sequencing increases retention in the major
because students have more time to develop their technical skills. At Indiana, the interdisciplinary
component of the curriculum is accomplished through a mixture of three methods: elective
courses covering technology use and issues in specific problem domains; a required senior
capstone project, aimed at solving a “real-world” problem; and a required cognate specialization
of at least five courses in another discipline. There are currently over 30 different specializations
from around 20 disciplines available, including: business, fine arts, economics, information
security, biology, chemistry, telecommunications, and geography. The School of Information (SI) at
the University of Michigan has offered master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Information since 1996. In
2008 SI joined with the Computer Science and Engineering Division, and the College of Literature,
Science and Arts, to offer a joint undergraduate informatics degree. To enter the major, students
are required to complete one prerequisite each in calculus, programming, statistics, and
information science. They then take a 16-credit core in discrete math, data structures, statistics,
and information technology ethics. Each then selects a severalcourse specialization track, which is
interdisciplinary but focuses on providing depth in a particular domain: computational informatics,
information analysis, life science informatics, or social computing. This program establishes a
strong foundation, domain depth and interdisciplinary training. However, to accomplish all of this,
it also imposes on students the heaviest required-credit burden of any liberal arts major. The
equal participation by the Computer Science and Engineering Division in the Michigan degree
emphasizes the ability to design an informatics program as a complement to a traditional
computer science degree; indeed, the Computer Science and Engineering Division continues to
offer two traditional CS bachelor’s degrees (one in engineering, one in liberal arts). One advantage
expected for the contextualized informatics degree is higher enrollment of women, and indeed,
about half the class of declared majors is female. On the downside, managing a degree that spans
three colleges and schools is challenging, with natural hurdles such as teaching budgets and credit
approvals across units.

LOOKING FOWARD

Informatics curricula are young and developing, but have proven popular. Indiana has over 400
students in the major. In just its first year, Michigan attracted 40 undergraduate majors. Evidence
comes also from successful courses offered outside a formal informatics program. For example, a
computer scientist and an economist at Cornell enroll about 300 students annually in
interdisciplinary “Networks,” which counts toward the majors in Computer Science, Economics,
Sociology, and Information Science

At the University of Pennsylvania, “Networked Life” (taught by a computer scientist) attracts about
200 students, and satisfies requirements in three majors: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics;
Science, Technology, and Society; and Computer and Information Science.

Informatics enables students to combine passions for both computation and another domain.
Since almost all domains now benefit from computational thinking, an informatics program can
embrace students and concentrations in art and design, history, linguistics, biology, sociology,
statistics, and economics. This diversity has costs, of course. One is that for now, in the early years,
students and faculty must continuously explain “informatics” to potential employers. Another is
providing strong enough foundations in both computation and another discipline to produce
competitive, successful graduates. The desire to deeply understand how computing works is what
has drawn most researchers to study computer science. These same individuals are then invested
with the responsibility to develop curricular programs and teach computing to the next generation
of computing professionals. The current (and all future) generations of students entering the
university have largely grown up in a world where computing is so commonplace that it is taken
for granted. Many of them are less interested in how computing works than in how to make it
work better in the solution of specific problems, drawn from virtually all other domains of human
knowledge. There will always be a need for students who study computer science. Informatics
provides a complementary path to reach other students for whom understanding and developing
computation contextually is crucial to the problems that motivate them. Like mathematics,
probability, and logic, in the future computation science will be taught embedded in many other
areas. Indeed, informatics is a path within which the technical accomplishments of computer
science, mathematics, and statistics become embedded in the ways we interact, imagine, and
produce throughout the scope of human experience.