Lawrence Kingsland is Assistant Director for Applied Informatics at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). He has been Chief of the Computer Science Branch at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an R&D division of NLM, since 1987. He came from the University of Missouri-Columbia to head NLM's Expert Systems Program in 1984.
Dr. Kingsland's graduate training is in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Bioengineering. He has been a researcher in Medical Informatics for more than 25 years, concentrating on issues in medical artificial intelligence. Among his group's projects are Internet Grateful Med, NLM's Access Model prototype for intelligent assisted biomedical information retrieval; the earlier Coach Expert Search Refinement System for users of NLM's Grateful Med front end software; the Coach Metathesaurus Browser for users of the UMLS Metathesaurus; AI/RHEUM, the knowledge-based consultant system in rheumatology which pioneered the use of the criteria table form of knowledge representation in medical expert systems; and the CTX and WinCTX multimedia expert system shells. Kingsland has authored or co-authored more than 70 manuscripts, book chapters, abstracts and short papers and has made more than 150 invited presentations in his field.
Dr. Kingsland has a specific interest in presenting and explaining complex systems to persons who may be specialists in other fields, and with colleagues at the Lister Hill Center has helped produce a series of videotapes and several interactive videodisc-based exhibits on medical artificial intelligence. One such exhibit was a component of a much larger exhibition called "The Age of Intelligent Machines" which opened at the Museum of Science in Boston, then went on a three-year tour to other major museums of science nationwide.
Kingsland was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1984. He has been Secretary of that honorary College and a member of its Executive Committee. He has served on the Boards of Directors of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, Inc. (SCAMC) and the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI). He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and has chaired the AMIA Awards Committee and the AMIA Bylaws Committee. He was Chairman of the Student Paper Competition for the SCAMC symposium for many years and served as Program Chairman for the Symposium itself in 1989. He is Coordinator of the annual eight-week National Institutes of Health elective in Medical Informatics for third-year and fourth-year medical students. Kingsland has received the NIH Merit Award and the NLM Director's Honor Award for his work in biomedical expert systems applications.
Dr. Kingsland currently chairs the Access Model component of NLM's System Reinvention initiative. The planning scope of the Access Model project includes all software tools and systems between an NLM user (which may be a person at a machine, or a program or intelligent agent that person has launched) and an NLM database service. A key part of the development effort is the creation of the next generation of NLM client software, which makes heavy use of the Unified Medical Language System Knowledge Sources to help users find what they need from among the millions of records in NLM's databases. Internet Grateful Med is the initial Access Model prototype. At the heart of Internet Grateful Med is an intelligent gateway designed to provide NLM's tens of thousands of online users with assisted searching in multiple databases on multiple NLM retrieval systems via the World-Wide Web.