Informatics Research Centre at Henley Business School

Introduction ot the Centre

Part of Henley Business School at the University of Reading, The Informatics Research Centre (IRC) provides a centre of gravity for interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and knowledge transfer in Informatics. The Centre defines informatics as 'the study of the creation, management and utilisation of information in scientific and economic activities.'

The IRC benefits from input of knowledge and expertise from various subject fields, including Biodiversity, Business Management, Economics, Information acquisition and assimilation, Intelligent Pervasive Spaces, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering, across a number of Schools and beyond.

Research in the Centre

The Centre's research activities can be found in domains of business and management, IT for strategic management, enterprise information systems, financial modelling and prognostics, bio-computing, construction management, intelligent buildings, pervasive intelligent spaces, and IT supported collaborative work. IRC attracts researchers and students from around the world. Our current research outcomes are actively disseminated to the research communities and industries. Research focuses on areas including:

• Applied informatics and semiotics - analysing and modelling organisations and their requirements as communication and information systems, business and IT architecture, autonomic systems, agent systems, ontology engineering for knowledge management.
• Business diagnosis and decision support - benchmarking, logistics, supply-chain management, virtual and distributed organisations, business and IT strategy, adaptive information architecture, service-oriented architecture, content management.
• Social informatics and collaborative systems - computer-supported cooperative work, community systems, social networks, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, data mining, business intelligence, media informatics.

• Perceptual, Usability and Information Acquisition - A user will not continue to pay for a system or device that they perceive to be of low quality, irrespective of its intrinsic appeal. Consequently, commercial development should not ignore user-centric design or else will risk alienating or excluding the end-user. Research includes quantifying the perceptual impact of emerging technologies; human-centric data manipulation; eye-tracking and attentive displays, as well as intelligent systems and human-computer interaction.

Members of the Centre

Please see a list of staff in the Informatics Research Centre.

Events in the Centre

Each academic year the Centre organises a series of conferences, workshops and events, designed to unite academic colleagues conducting research spanning the broad, outlined fields above.