What is informatics and why is this study important today? Professor at Indiana University, David Wild is the featured guest on The AI Purity Podcast episode 6 and he answers this question and more.
David Wild brings a wealth of knowledge and experience as the director of the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab and Integrative Data Science Lab at the university where he teaches. Not only is David a professor, but he has also founded the companies Konnex.AI and Data2Discovery and authored the book “Personal Digital Resilience Handbook”.
David Wild’s Career Journey
During the 1980s when David Wild was growing up in the UK, there was an apparent explosion in home computing. “[It was a] really exciting time in computing, and I just fell in love with computers and what they might be able to do”, shares David. It was then that David started learning and writing code. He worked at a company that sold utility software and other software for home computers.
After completing his computer science degree, David recalls struggling with applying his newly learned skills, he says, “I was kind of struggling as to how can I really have [an] impact with these skills that I’m learning”. Having an impact on people was something important for David and thanks to one of his professors he would get the opportunity to take up a PhD in computer-aided drug discovery. It was an entirely new discipline that David was quite excited about. He would eventually work in the pharmaceutical industry for several years alongside scientists discovering new drugs before he had a career shift in 2006.
Besides doing something that impacts people’s lives in a positive way, David has also “fallen in love with difficult problems”. It was the driving force behind eventually leveraging AI, his computing skills, and his research abilities to do more good through the companies he established.
Today, he has brought his diverse talents leveraging AI technologies to emergency management spaces, the pharmaceutical industry, and the realm of academia as a professor and author.
AI Purity’s services cover a wide range of industry professionals and one of its main goals has always been to safeguard academic integrity. Learn how AI Purity aims to support educators as more and more students lean on AI-assisted learning.
David’s History In The Medical Field
David’s computer science degree preceded his career in the medical field as he is also a certified emergency medical technician. “Even from being a kid, I loved the action of emergency response”, David says. With his line of work being in front of the computer often he said he wanted to do something a little more exciting with more “direct impact”. So David set out to train as an EMT and says he loved it.
The diversity between his two careers would eventually make David feel like there’s a disconnect. “For over 14 years, I’ve been going out on ambulance runs to patients”, at the same time, David continues, “In my day job, I was playing with all these cool AI tools.” As a computer scientist and EMT, David says, “I had a longstanding passion to bring these two worlds together.” In 2019, when David joined the faculty of Indiana University and became director of the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab, he was able to merge the two disciplines.
According to David, the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab is dedicated to uncovering how advanced technology can help first responders, emergency managers, and everyone else in the industry keep people safe.
AI is more than just large language models that can generate text and images, there are many real-world AI applications that benefit various industries that you might have not known before. Read “Machine Learning Applied In The Real World” to learn more.
What Is Informatics?
Back in 2006, when David had just started teaching at Indiana University, he recalled an incident at a gas station. He had an “IU Informatics” sticker on his car and someone had come up to him and asked, “What is informatics?” David says at the time, he had no answer so instead he replies, “I don’t actually know. I’m going to find out.”
To define informatics, David says there’s a way to characterize and understand the term better. According to David, data science is how we can use data, predict data, and manage data, computer science is about building machines and programming them to do useful things, and “informatics is right at the interface with human beings”. It’s all about studying and applying informatics technology in a way that is useful to people.
There are different types of informatics according to David, like animal informatics is “what we can learn from animals about the use of technology and how we can actually have technology that helps animals. Another type of informatics according to Michigan Tech is health informatics. It is defined as the ability to analyze data that is critical to aiding the success of healthcare organizations. The informatics definition for David is the “space between technology and human beings.”
Learn about AI potentially being used to disseminate disinformation in episode 3, “AI’s Impact On Ethical Journalism & Disinformation”.
The Importance of Digital Resilience
The concept of digital resilience came to David when he was building the Data Science program at Indiana University that you could call an application of medical informatics. During the process, he met with companies that would collect information about people and he saw it as something that wasn’t just as simple as storing information. The collected data from people are integrated and scored and he thought, “so many things can go wrong with this”.
With the amount of information and data shared online, it’s becoming a huge vulnerability. David even says, “We’ve lost control of all this personal information about us, but it’s also the fact that we’re reliant on systems that somebody else is controlling.” David thought of how data can be kept private or protected at least similar to locking the front door of your home.
The Personal Digital Resilience Handbook contains information for its readers so that they can safely exist online without having to worry about their personal information or data being unsafe.
AI Purity is a platform that safeguards the information and data our users trust us with. When you use our AI text detection platform, you can be sure that AI Purity doesn’t collect, store, and share the text uploaded on our platform.
Konnex.AI and Data2Discovery
One of David’s companies, Data2Discovery was born out of research he did at Indiana University. Together with Professor Ying Ding, they discovered ways to integrate data on chemical compounds, proteins, and biological pathways. With that data they could gather insights and predictions on potential side effects of drugs, toxicology of drugs, and whether or not certain drugs would be effective.
Data2Discovery is a “mature AI for drug discovery” that took almost a decade to establish. The company partners with pharmaceutical companies and is a great example of applying and learning what is informatics.
Konnex.AI differs as it is meant for the emergency management space. David says, “I saw this recurring problem that as we get this explosion of information in the world and the information sources, it becomes increasingly difficult to bring it all together in a way that’s kind of actionable.” There’s a huge amount of data and information available today, unlike back in the day when people would just read newspapers. This information is critical for decision-making, but what if there’s too much for one person to collate?
The solution Konnex.AI offers according to David is it automates with the help of AI the process of creating reports and briefings. The sources of information and data then get summarized and digestible so that people who are responsible for making decisions aren’t overwhelmed or overloaded with information.
AI Purity is a perfect example of leveraging AI while pioneering ethical AI use. Find out more about how AI Purity supports the next generation to teach them the implications of AI-assisted learning.
Listen To The AI Purity Podcast
David Wild perfectly encapsulates what is informatics and answers the question ‘What is informatics used for?’ in episode 6 of The AI Purity Podcast. The full podcast is available to watch on YouTube and listen to on Spotify.
AI Purity might be the newest AI text detection platform but it has all the latest features never-before-seen in an AI detector before. Check out our website and see how the solutions AI Purity offers can help you in our growing AI-driven world.