Edward H. Shortliffe

Edward (Ted) Hance Shortliffe (born 1947) is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist, 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. He is regarded as a founder of the field of biomedical informatics, received the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence in 2006, and in July 2009 became president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Informatics Association, an organization he had helped form between 1988 and 1990.