With the amount of scientific data collected this year equaling the amount of scientific data collected throughout history, making sense of that data is a priority—and that’s what computer and information scientists need to become engaged in, said renowned Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.
“We have all these scientific facts and no easy way of organizing them,” said Gray, who recently spoke as part of the School of Information Sciences and Technology’s Distinguished Speakers Series. “We can help a lot by writing software that does modeling, visualization, analysis and architecture.”
Gray pointed out that science has gone through four stages in this order: descriptive, physical, computational and, more recently, informational. This latter phase has set the stage for the emerging importance of informatics in science. According to Gray, all science has now become informatics and science informatics will become the dominant research paradigm in science's future.
Gray drew a full house for his discussion of the importance of informatics as an aid for “data overload,” as well as his own experiences working with astronomy data. The senior researcher and manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center is building online databases that will put astronomy data on the Internet. When completed, the Internet will be the world’s best telescope, according to Gray.
