Melbourne School of Engineering

Informatics 1 & 2

Informatics is about using computers to work with digital information - gathering, manipulating and visualising information and data. It’s the study of tools and technologies to solve problems in finance, health, journalism, biology, engineering, linguistics, communication.

Informatics 1 & 2 are two subjects available to first-year students studying Arts, Commerce, Environments and Music, as well as Science and Engineering students. It also forms part of the Diploma of Informatics

 

Informatics 1: Practical Computing

This subject will introduce you to computational methods for analysing and visualising structured data. It covers computational thinking, programming, visualisation, web-centric computing; and an overview of information and communications technology. Workshops and team projects will give you practical experience in solving data-rich problems.


Informatics 2: People, Data and the Web

This subject explores the worldwide web of data. Students will select a problem domain, identify live web data sources, and use computational methods to represent, transform, and present information for human consumption. This subject covers the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and associated web technologies; systems for managing information in a shared environment; and social implications of networked computing.


Group Projects

Here are some examples of the projects you will undertake, drawing on information sources to create solutions to real world questions.

Entertainment

How do people choose what to watch from the thousands of movies that are released every year? Your team will work with a database of 4,500 feature films - containing details about ratings, genres, directors, actors, reviews, and worldwide gross - to build a web-based movie recommender system.

Finance
How can financial information be used to maximise profit from investments? Your team will develop an investment scheme using data about share price movements, exchange rates and industry news. You will demonstate how your scheme maximises returns by constructing a web-based market analysis system that tracks its performance over time relative to various ‘baseline’ investment schemes.

Humanities
How can world development indicators be used to allocate funds to the world’s poorest countries? Your team will work with data from the World Bank including GDP, GNI, population and life-expectancy, and develop a web-based system for analysing trends and patterns in the data, and for recommending how development aid should be distributed to reduce global poverty.

Skills you will learn


Contact Hours

72 contact hours per semester: 36 one-hour lectures (three per week) and 12 three-hour workshops (one per week)


More information