John McCarthy at a Stanford University conference in 2006.

PALO
ALTO, Calif. (AP) — John McCarthy, a pioneer in artificial intelligence
technology and creator of the computer programming language often used
in that field, has died. He was 84.

Stanford
University, where McCarthy was a professor for four decades, announced
McCarthy’s death Monday. The school said he died at his Palo Alto home
but did not provide a cause.

Tributes
to McCarthy flooded into Twitter, where people mourned the loss of
another Silicon Valley technology innovator. Apple Inc. co-founder Steve
Jobs and C programming creator and UNIX co-developer Dennis Ritchie
died earlier this month.

McCarthy
was a leader in the artificial intelligence field, coining the term in a
1955 research proposal. He said “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.”

He
went on to create the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Lab, serving as its director from 1965 to 1980.

In
1958, McCarthy invented the programming language Lisp, which paved the
way for voice recognition technology, including Siri, the personal
assistant application on the newest iPhone.

McCarthy
also developed the concept of computer time-sharing, which allowed
multiple users to interact with a single computer. That lay the
foundation for cloud computing today.

Born
in Boston on Sept. 4, 1927, McCarthy moved west to pursue a degree in
math at the California Institute of Technology. He received a doctorate
in math from Princeton in 1951, and then became a professor at Princeton
until 1953. He did turns at MIT and Dartmouth before settling at
Stanford in 1962 until his retirement at the end of 2000.

“He
could be blunt, but John was always kind and generous with his time,
especially with students, and he was sharp until the end,” said Ed
Feigenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a
colleague recruited by McCarthy in the 1960s. “He was always focused on
the future. Always inventing, inventing, inventing.”

McCarthy
won several awards including the A.M. Turing Award in 1971, the highest
recognition in computer science, for his contributions to the
artificial intelligence field. He was also honored with the Kyoto Prize
in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990.

He
is survived by his third wife, Carolyn Talcott of Palo Alto; two
daughters, Susan McCarthy of San Francisco and Sarah McCarthy of Nevada
City, Calif.; a son, Timothy McCarthy of Palo Alto; a brother, Patrick,
of Los Angeles; two grandchildren; and his first wife, Martha Coyote.

McCarthy’s second wife, Vera Watson, died in 1978 in a mountain-climbing accident attempting to scale Annapurna in Nepal.

SOURCE: The Associated Press