Edward H. Shortliffe

Edward ("Ted") Hance Shortliffe (born 1947) is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice (because it preceded the era of local-area networking and could not be integrated with patient records and physician workflow), its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in the development of rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets and other areas, and its design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine. He is also regarded as a founder of the field of biomedical informatics, and in 2006 received one of its highest honors, the Morris F. Collen Award given by the American College of Medical Informatics.He has held administrative positions in academic medicine, research and national bodies including the Institute of Medicine, American College of Physicians, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Library of Medicine (NLM), and been influential in the development of medicine, computing and biomedical informatics nationally and internationally. His interests include the broad range of issues related to integrated medical decision-support systems and their implementation, biomedical informatics and medical education and training, and the Internet in medicine. In March 2007, he became founding dean of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine - Phoenix campus. He stepped down from this position in May 2008 and in January 2009 transferred his primary academic appointment to Arizona State University where he became professor of biomedical informatics. He maintained a secondary appointment as professor of basic medical sciences and of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (Phoenix Campus). In November 2009 he transferred his academic home to a part-time appointment as professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he lived until November 2011. Since that time he has returned to New York City, where he continues as an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University. In July 2009, Shortliffe assumed a position as president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Informatics Association, an organization that he helped to form between 1988 and 1990 when he was President of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. In late 2011 he announced his intention to step down from this position in 2012.