Preface

In August of 1980, Stanford University was the site of the annual workshop on artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM). This specialized area of medical computer science research had been born almost ten years earlier with the near-simultaneous development of AIM research groups at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in collaboration with physicians from the Tufts New England Medical Center), the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, and Stanford. These small groups of computer scientists working in the field were drawn together naturally by their common interests and by the establishment of the SUMEX-AIM network (Stanford University Medical EXperimental Computer for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine). This computing resource was established by the Biotechnology Resources Program of the NIH in 1974 and consisted of a pair of computers, one at Rutgers and one at Stanford, linked by a communications network. The funding for SUMEX-AIM not only provided computing power for researchers exploring the potential of artificial intelligence techniques in medicine but also established a series of annual workshops so that the investigators could gather to,share their insight, results, and ideas regarding approaches to the difficulties they encountered.