A feel-good atmosphere was in the room yesterday at the inaugural symposium for Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing. It’s one of Harvard’s several new interdisciplinary research programs that aim to bring together people from the university’s different schools, campuses and hospitals to collaborate more.

I was struck by the warm-and-fuzzy, collaborative mood. One speaker said he felt like the meeting would end in a group hug. The overall theme: scientists from many disciplines now get to play with some advanced instruments (from telescopes to MRI scanners) that collect way more data than they know what to do with. So they’re calling in the computer scientists to help them come with new tools to analyze, visualize and store terabytes worth of information.

Time will tell whether bringing computer scientists and scientists from other fields like astronomy, physics and medicine will yield high-impact research results. But they seem to be off to an enthusiastic start. Speakers presented some intriguing projects:

• Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and medical imaging experts from Brigham and Women’s hospital got together to adapt software originally developed to visualize data from, say, MRI scans, for use on astronomy data.

• Harvard neuroscientists are working with computer scientists to build the connectome, a visual map of the wiring between brain and nervous system cells

• And probably the most jaw-dropping presentation of the day: sophisticated animations of biological processes inside the cell. Later this spring, Harvard will release the final versions of these multimedia representations for use in Harvard undergraduate classes.