Peter Szolovits is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and head of the Clinical Decision-Making Group within CSAIL. His research centers on the application of AI methods to problems of medical decision making and design of information systems for health care institutions and patients. He has worked on problems of diagnosis, therapy planning, execution and monitoring for various medical conditions, computational aspects of genetic counseling, controlled sharing of health information, and privacy and confidentiality issues in medical record systems.

Professor Szolovits’ interests in AI include knowledge representation, qualitative reasoning, and probabilistic inference. His interests in medical computing include Web-based heterogeneous medical record systems, life-long personal health information systems, and design of cryptographic schemes for health identifiers. He teaches classes in artificial intelligence, programming languages, medical computing, medical decision making, knowledge-based systems, computer systems engineering and probabilistic inference.

Prof. Szolovits has served on journal editorial boards and as program chairman and on the program committees of national conferences. He has been a founder of and consultant for several companies that apply AI to problems of commercial interest. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and his PhD in information science, both from Caltech. Prof. Szolovits was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He recently served as a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and also served as a member of the National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee.