"In October, the IU Board of Trustees voted to combine the School of Informatics with IU’s long-standing, highly-ranked, and renowned School of Library and Information Science, to form a new school called the School of Informatics and Computing." (see below)
IU Informatics Dean Bobby Schnabel's positive comments about the merger with SLIS appeared in the Indiana Informatics Fall 2012 alumni magazine. The full text of his article is below. Dean Schnabel will become the Dean of the new School of Informatics and Computing that will include all current SLIS programs effective July 1, 2013.
SLIS has collected some of the merger announcements to help keep students, faculty, alumni and friends updated.
• SLIS and Informatics Merger Approved
Current and past issues of Indiana Informatics are available online.
• Indiana Informatics, Fall 2012, Vol. 10, No. 1
A related SLIS News story highlight's SLIS Dean Debora Shaw's letter in the Fall 2012 issue of SLIS Network (alumni magazine.)
• SLIS Alumni Magazine, Fall 2012: Exploring Opportunities
Multidisciplinary research: I, T,π and pitchfork
by Dean Bobby Schnabel, Indiana Informatics, Fall 2012
At a meeting I attended recently, some participants reflected on the shifting nature of research. They asserted that most academic research started out in an “I” shape – very deep and very narrow. Then some research evolved to a “T” shape – deep and narrow in one key aspect coupled with shallower expertise in surrounding areas. More recently, some of the most impactful multi-disciplinary research has the shape of the Greek letter Pi (“π”) – narrow and deep in two fields augmented by shallower surrounding knowledge – or possibly even a pitchfork, narrow and deep in three to four areas with shallower nearby expertise.
The School of Informatics was founded on the premise that multi-disciplinary research – π or pitchfork – would be a major part of the culture and practice of the school, and it definitely is fulfilling this expectation. Given the breadth of the school, such research can occur through collaborations that are solely within the school or that extend outside it. The cover story of this issue, about robotics research, is an excellent example of a multi-disciplinary topic where our faculty collaborate with each other in ways that bridge the technical side of robotics with social issues and also with faculty outside of our school who apply robotics in fields such as elder care.
This example is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the multi-disciplinary research collaborations that our faculty members are engaged in. The range of those collaborations is staggering. Some of these include novel combinations of research areas within the school, such as award-winning research on the security of genomic data that combines bioinformatics and computer security, or research on independent living for seniors that combines mobile computing with computer security and privacy. Even more collaborative research includes interactions with faculty from other IU schools and around the world in areas including biology, chemistry, fine arts, geology, library science, medicine, music, nursing, political science, public health, and many more. A few examples that illustrate the diversity and impact of these collaborations include: an award-winning evaluation of emergency care between health informatics faculty and researchers at Indianapolis’ Regenstrief Institute, a leading healthcare institute; collaboration between chemical informatics faculty and semantic network research in the School of Library and Information Science on early stage drug discovery techniques; joint research between computer science, fine arts, and industry researchers on plenoptic photography, a technique that is particularly useful for capturing moving objects; and a recent collaboration between bioinformatics and biology researchers that led to the most extensive pictures ever of an organism’s DNA mutation processes.
Now the School is about to embark upon its next, even more multidisciplinary stage – we are growing! In October, the IU Board of Trustees voted to combine the School of Informatics with IU’s long-standing, highly-ranked, and renowned School of Library and Information Science, to form a new school called the School of Informatics and Computing. This merger, effective July 1, 2013 on both our Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, will form one of the broadest, largest, and highest quality computing and information schools anywhere. The faculty members of the two schools collaborate extensively already, and this is certain to increase. Look for more news on this exciting time in our School’s history in the coming months – and in the next issue of Indiana Informatics!
Posted November 30, 2012