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

1. research on the principles underlying information technology,
2. development of practical technology based on this research, and
3. 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
• Integration Technology
• Information Capture
• Human-Computer Interaction