COMP427 The Impact of Information Technology

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COMP427The Impact of Information Technology
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Appreciating the Benefits

• Internet
• Education and Training
• Crime Fighting
• Health and Medicine
• Automation
• Environmental Protection
• And more .

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Internet

• E-Mail and the World Wide Web are probably the
  two computer applications most widely used by
  both technical and non-technical people
• E-mail has many advantages of phone calls
• World Wide Web make the collection, searching,
  analysis, storage, access, and distribution of
  large amounts of information much easier,
  cheaper, and faster than before

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Internet (contd)

• The web is so widely and commonly used now that
  we sometimes forget how new and extraordinary it
  is. Established in Europe in 1990 to enable
  high-energy physicists to share pictures and text
  with colleagues in other countries
• As the Web became a tool for electronic commerce
  and ordinary users, it grew at an astonishing
  rate. In 1998, there were 320 million Web pages.
  By 2001, there were 3 billion

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Internet (contd)

• Personal Computers (and especially the Web)
  increase the independence and options available
  to people. These tools make it possible, or much
  easier than before, for ordinary people to make
  better decisions about everything from movies to
  medical treatments and to do things which we used
  to reply on experts to do for us
• Web browsers make it so easy to download and
  print documents that relatively recent previous
  innovations quickly became out-of-date.

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Internet (contd)

• The Web help us not only to find material of
  interest to us, but also to make available to the
  world whatever information we want to provide
• Now we can access the Web and send e-mail or make
  phone calls from a flight 30,000 feet up in the
  sky

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Education and Training

• With information technology, a variety of
  distance learning opportunities developed.
  Students in rural towns that cannot afford a
  teacher for specialized subjects take classes
  offered in nearby cities by interactive
  television
• Speech recognition is a useful tool in many
  education and training programs. Computer
  programs that teach foreign languages give
  instruction in correct pronunciation if they do
  not recognize what the user says

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Education and Training

• Another successful education application is
  teaching illiterate adults to read. Traditional
  methods fail for many people who are embarrassed,
  are uninspired by the teaching techniques, or are
  intimidated by a teachers impatience with their
  mistakes
• People who work full time, having varying work
  schedules that conflict with normal class
  schedules, or have small children at home benefit
  from the flexibility of Web courses
• People who cannot travel easily because of
  disabilities benefit from increased learning
  opportunities at home

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Crime Fighting

• Matching of fingerprints and photographs of
  suspects can now be done by computer
• Fast processors, large data-storage capacity, and
  fast algorithms for processing digitized images
  made it possible for police to use a computer
  system to generate a composite photo of a suspect
  from a witness description, then search
  databases with criminal mug shots to find a match

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Crime Fighting

• Specialized Internet newsgroup and Web sites help
  solve and deter crimes. Dealers in collectible
  items post information about stolen art, rare
  books, and even valuable baseball cards, so that
  a thief can be caught when trying to sell them
• In Hong Kong, the HK Police Force has developed a
  simulation system with real video to train the
  police officers to handle different crime
  environments

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Health and Medicine

• Computers are used in virtually all phases of
  medicine, from research to the operating room to
  maintain patient records.
• Physicians use machines such as CT
  (computer-aided tomography) scanners and MRI
  (magnetic resonance imaging) machines for medical
  imaging.
• Patient-monitoring devices of all sorts are now
  routinely used during and after surgery,
  providing more information about the patients
  condition and quickly warning of complications

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Health and Medicine

• Hospitals and medical centers replaced many paper
  patient records with computerized records.
• Many computer-based systems aid doctors in
  diagnosing diseases, some are databases that can
  be reached by entering symptoms

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Health and Medicine

• Telemedicine refers to remote performance of
  medical exams, analyses, and procedures using
  specialized equipment and computer networks
• Telemedicine is used on long airplane flights to
  help treat a sick passenger and to ascertain
  whether an emergency landing is needed

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Health and Medicine

• One of the most heartwarming applications of
  information technology is the restoration of
  abilities, productivity, and independence to
  people with physical disabilities
• People with poor eyesight can direct a computer
  display to use a large type size
• People who are blind, computers equipped with
  speech synthesizers read aloud what a sighted
  person sees on the screen

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Automation

• Many factories and warehouses now use
  computer-controlled automation
• Robotic arms and other robotic devices are
  another form of automation. Robot arms are used
  in factories to assemble products faster and more
  accurately than people can.
• Smart cards are the size of credit cards, but
  they contain a microprocessor and memory.
  Hundreds of applications, including uses of
  financial transactions, health care, credit
  cards, phone cards are being developed

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Environmental Protection

• Electronic storage of text, and the ability to
  edit and update have reduced the need for paper
  in many businesses and the amount of trash
  produced
• Electronic books have the potential to reduce use
  of paper drastically
• Storage of paper records is another big expense
  that is being reduced by electronic media

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Telecommunications

• Information technology has improved people could
  access Internet anytime, anywhere
• Turn any place into a productive work place
• Turn waiting time into productive time
• Telecommunications has also shortened the
  distance among places