Ted Shortliffe

Edward (Ted) H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD, MACP, FACMI is a biomedical informatician, physician and computer scientist who is widely regarded as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He currently acts as a professor and senior advisor to the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State, serves as scholar-in-residence at the New York Academy of Medicine and holds adjunct positions at Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical College.

In the 1970s, Dr. Shortliffe was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems used for diagnosis and treatment of severe infections. Because it preceded the era of local-area networking, it was never used in practice; however, its performance was shown to be comparable and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This had a monumental influence on the subsequent development of computing in medicine.

Following a residency in internal medicine, Dr. Shortliffe joined the Stanford faculty in 1979 and moved to Columbia University in 2000. He later served as founding dean of the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He has written more than 300 articles and books in the fields of biomedical computing and artificial intelligence, including a major textbook, and is considered a founder of the field of biomedical informatics.