John McCarthy : Artificial Intelligence Forefather * September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011

John McCarthy was a Stanford Professor Emeritus of Computer Science

🔽 In 1955, McCarthy authored a proposal for a two-month,
10-person summer research conference on "artificial intelligence"

– the first use of the term in publication.

McCarthy wrote

"The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or
any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

McCarthy invented
The computer programming language in 1958

🔽 LISP is still used today as programming language for artificial intelligence. It is the second oldest programming language .

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John McCarthy co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project and what became the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, serving as director at Stanford from 1965 until 1980.

While at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL ) In 1960, McCarthy authored a paper titled, "Programs with Common Sense,"

🔽 This document lay out the principles of his programming philosophy by describing

" A system which is to evolve intelligence of human order."

🔽 John McCarthy was also vital in developing the concept of computer time-sharing in the late 50's early 60's while at SAIL.

🔽 His work advanced the improvement and efficiency of distributed computing .This predated the era of cloud computing by decades. ![j2.jpg()

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Les Earnest, a senior research scientist emeritus at Stanford and an early collaborator at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) with McCarthy wrote this in his memoir
A bunch of people decided that time-sharing was clearly the way to work with a computer, but nobody could figure out how to make it work for general purpose computing – nobody except John .

🔽 John McCarthy was born on Sept. 4, 1927, in Boston. He earned his undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1948 and his PhD at Princeton in 1951, both in mathematics.

🔽 He was an instructor at Princeton from 1951 until 1953 when he came to Stanford as an assistant professor.

🔽 In 1955, he left for Dartmouth and then for MIT before returning to Stanford for good in 1962 as a full professor of computer science. He retired Jan. 1, 2001.

🔽 The Association of Computing Machinery honored McCarthy with the A. M. Turing Award in 1971, the highest recognition in computer science.

🔽 John McCarty died at his home in Stanford Monday, Oct. 24 2011 . He was 84.