Information and Computer Science

Information and Computer Science (ICS) or Computer and Information Science (CIS) (plural forms, i.e. Sciences, may also be used) is a field that emphasizes both computing and informatics, upholding the strong association between the fields of information sciences and computer sciences and treating computers as a tool rather than a field.

Information science is one with a long history, unlike the – relatively – very young field of computer science, and is primarily concerned with gathering, storing, disseminating, sharing and protecting any and all forms of information. It is a broad field, covering a myriad of different areas but is often referenced alongside computer science because of the incredibly useful nature of computers and computer programs in helping those studying and doing research in the field – particularly in helping to analyse data and in spotting patterns too broad for a human to intuitively perceive. While information science is sometimes confused with information theory the two have vastly different subject matter. Information theory focuses on one particular mathematical concept of information while information science is focused on all aspects of the processes and techniques of information.

Computer science, on the other hand, is less focused on information and its different states, but more, in a very broad sense, on the use of computers – both in theory and practice – to design and implement algorithms in order to aid the processing of information during the different states described above. It has strong foundations in the field of mathematics, as the very first recognised practitioners of the field were renowned mathematicians such as Alan Turing.

Information Science and computing began to converge in the 1950s and 1960s, as information scientists started to realize the many ways computers would improve information storage and retrieval.

Due to the distinction between computers and computing, some research groups refer to "computing" or "Datalogy". The French refer to computer science as . The term "information and communications technology", or ICT, refers to how humans communicate with using machines and computers, making a distinction from "information and computer science", which is how computers use and gain information.

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