Textbook of AI

1947–, Physician, computer scientist

Also known as: Edward H. Shortliffe

Edward H. Shortliffe is an American physician and computer scientist whose 1975 Stanford PhD thesis produced MYCIN, an expert system for diagnosing bacterial infections of the blood and meningitis and recommending appropriate antibiotic therapy. MYCIN encoded approximately 600 rules elicited from infectious-disease specialists, used a backward-chaining inference engine and a simple certainty factor calculus for handling uncertainty, and in clinical evaluations performed at the level of, or slightly above, expert physicians.

MYCIN was never deployed clinically, partly because of regulatory and liability questions, partly because it required typing diagnostic data in the era before networked clinical systems, but its architecture became the template for an entire generation of medical and non-medical expert systems. Its inference engine, decoupled from its rules, became EMYCIN (Empty MYCIN, 1981), the first general-purpose expert-system shell.

Shortliffe co-founded the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and chaired the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia, then Arizona State, then served as president of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has shaped the trajectory of medical AI for fifty years and remains an active commentator on the present generation of clinical AI systems.