THE ROLE OF INFORMATICS IN THE NEXT DECADE OF BIG SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES

Data Science and Informatics methods have been at the center of many recent scientific discoveries and have opened up new frontiers in many areas of scientific inquiry. In this presentation, I will take you through some of the most recent and exciting discoveries we've made and how informatics methods played a central role in these discoveries, including discoveries made for data-driven biosignature detection, predicting and understanding mineral occurrences and more.

We will explore data science methods developed to address sparse dataset, specifically in geochemistry. In this approach, we use network science to make extremely sparse datasets analyzable, and thus can answer questions about samples with sparse data, including meteorites, rare minerals, and planetary materials.

Lastly, we will also discuss the biggest hurdles in the next decade of geoinformatics. We will see what the new era AI means for the geosciences and what problems still remain to be solved.