Estimating the informativeness of data

Not all data are created equal. But how much information is any piece of data likely to contain? This question is central to medical testing, designing scientific experiments, and even to everyday human learning and thinking. MIT researchers have developed a new way to solve this problem, opening up new applications in medicine, scientific discovery, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. In theory, the 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," by the late MIT Professor Emeritus Claude Shannon answered this question definitively.