<p>McCarthy, who died on Sunday, was a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the Palo Alto, California-based university, where he taught for nearly four decades.<br /><br />McCarthy is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence," or AI, in a 1955 research proposal he submitted with several other scientists while at Dartmouth College.<br />The research proposal called for a study into "how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves."<br /><br />McCarthy was the creator of the LISP programming language widely used by AI researchers.<br />He joined the faculty of Stanford in 1962 and founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), which has been credited with a number of advances in the field of making "intelligent machines."<br /><br />According to the Stanford University website, the first challenge undertaken by SAIL scientists was to "design robots able to successfully interact with the physical world."<br />In an online profile of McCarthy, Stanford quoted him as saying in a 2003 presentation that computers eventually will achieve "human-level" intelligence.<br /><br />"Understanding intelligence is a difficult scientific problem, but lots of difficult scientific problems have been solved," he said. "There's nothing humans can do that humans can't make computers do."<br /><br />McCarthy, who retired from Stanford in 2000, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.</p>
<p>McCarthy, who died on Sunday, was a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the Palo Alto, California-based university, where he taught for nearly four decades.<br /><br />McCarthy is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence," or AI, in a 1955 research proposal he submitted with several other scientists while at Dartmouth College.<br />The research proposal called for a study into "how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves."<br /><br />McCarthy was the creator of the LISP programming language widely used by AI researchers.<br />He joined the faculty of Stanford in 1962 and founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), which has been credited with a number of advances in the field of making "intelligent machines."<br /><br />According to the Stanford University website, the first challenge undertaken by SAIL scientists was to "design robots able to successfully interact with the physical world."<br />In an online profile of McCarthy, Stanford quoted him as saying in a 2003 presentation that computers eventually will achieve "human-level" intelligence.<br /><br />"Understanding intelligence is a difficult scientific problem, but lots of difficult scientific problems have been solved," he said. "There's nothing humans can do that humans can't make computers do."<br /><br />McCarthy, who retired from Stanford in 2000, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.</p>