Center for Information Technology (CIT)

The Center for Information Technology is a multidisciplinary laboratory operated by Stanford University in association with affiliated organizations from industry, government, and academia. The staff of the Center includes a core of full-time employees, together with faculty and students from Stanford and professionals from the affiliated organizations.

The central focus of the Center's activity is the development of advanced information technology -- computer technology appropriate to the encoding, storage, communication, manipulation, and use of information in digital form. Examples of this technology include digital libraries, electronic education, electronic commerce, computer-based patient records, and computer-based collaborative engineering.

In a departure from the tradition of many academic organizations, the work of the Center is vertically integrated, with a significant amount of effort devoted to

research on the principles underlying information technology,
development of practical technology based on this research, and
demonstrations and testbeds to illustrate this technology and assess its strength and limitations.

In order to ensure a steady flow of innovative ideas into the Center's development efforts, the Center conducts basic research on the following topics.

Multimedia Technology (Contact -- Meng)
Integration Technology (Contact -- Garcia-Molina)
Information Capture (Contact -- Fikes)
Human-Computer Interaction (Contact -- Winograd)

The goal of the Center's current development effort is the creation of a prototype information infrastructure in the Silicon Valley region -- the Broad Area Syndicated Information System (Basis). The Center's affiliates are working to deploy the hardware and low-level software needed for this effort. The Center will make contributions in the following areas.

Standards and protocols for application-level communication
Software libraries to help developers implement systems compatible with these standards and protocols
Automated services to help systems find each other and coordinate their efforts
System configuration and monitoring aids to help system managers administer the infrastructure

In order to illustrate and assess the value of this work, the Center is using this technology on the following application projects.

CommerceNet (Contact -- Genesereth): A system using the Internet to link the Silicon Valley's food chain of integrated circuit and component manufacturers, job shops, distributors, and computer systems manufacturers. The first step will allow manufacturers and distributors to make their product literature and catalogs available on line for engineers to browse. On-line ordering, delivery scheduling, part locating, and other services will then be added incrementally. The system will utilize enhanced Internet services such as privacy-enhanced multimedia mail, directories of people and services, format translation, and billing and payment.
Health Care (Contact -- Shortliffe): A computerized patient record system that crosses the current boundaries between health care providers, allowing controlled distributed access and supporting compatibility and information exchange. The system will include wired and wireless communication, links between diverse information sources (physicians, nurses, administration, insurers, labs, radiology, cardiology, etc.) and the on-line record, decision-support tools to help providers give more effective and efficient care, well-engineered user interfaces embedded in portable and stationary computing systems, appropriate privacy safeguards, management tools to facilitate assessment of care outcomes and effectiveness, and provisions for patient access to their medical records.

Michael R. Genesereth