Dartmouth hosts the AI@50 conference

Background

The phrase "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy, as part of a grant proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.^[2] That summer meeting is conventionally treated as the starting point of AI as a named field: a group of researchers came together for a few weeks to work on the question of whether machines could be made to simulate aspects of intelligence.

Fifty years later, Dartmouth College hosted a celebration of the anniversary of that workshop.^[2] Anniversary conferences of this kind serve two purposes at once: they look back at how a research field began, and they give the researchers working in it a moment to argue about where it is going next.

The conference

The anniversary event was held under the name "The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next 50 Years", abbreviated AI@50.^[2] Wikipedia gives the longer formal title "Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years" and dates the meeting to 13–15 July 2006.^[3]

The conference was led by James Moor, a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, who is described as its director and organizer.^[2][3]

The Dartmouth, the College's student newspaper, reported on 18 July 2006 that some of the original participants had returned to the College for the fiftieth-anniversary conference.^[1] The paper described the AI@50 programme as a three-day event running from Thursday through Saturday, with more than 40 presentations, including sessions titled "The Future of AI" and "The Future of the Future".^[1] A programme of that shape mixes retrospective talks about how particular problems were first posed with forward-looking sessions about open questions.

Participants

A fiftieth anniversary is unusual in a technical field because the founders may still be alive to attend. Wikipedia lists five of the ten original Dartmouth workshop attendees as present at AI@50: Marvin Minsky, Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More and John McCarthy.^[3] Their presence put the people who had written the 1955 proposal and taken part in the 1956 summer project in the same rooms as researchers who had entered the field decades later.

Sponsorship and record

According to Wikipedia, the conference was sponsored by Dartmouth College, General Electric and the Frederick Whittemore Foundation, and a 200,000 dollar DARPA grant to George Cybenko called for a report of the proceedings.^[3] That requirement matters for anyone trying to reconstruct the event later: a sponsored meeting leaves a written trace, while an unrecorded one survives only in the memories of the people who were there.

A summary report by conference director James H. Moor was published in AI Magazine.^[3]

Why it matters

The 1956 summer project is the event from which the field takes both its name and its founding date, and the coining of the phrase in McCarthy's 1955 proposal is the origin point usually cited.^[2] AI@50 marked the half-century since that meeting.^[2] By bringing back several of the ten original attendees and pairing them with a programme of more than 40 presentations,^[1][3] it created a documented occasion on which the founding generation and later researchers described the same field from different vantage points. Dartmouth's own provost report refers back to the conference, so the meeting also became part of how the College describes its role in the history of the field.^[2] For readers following the field's timeline, AI@50 sits between the 1956 workshop and the present as a checkable marker: a dated, sponsored, published event at which the people who started the field said publicly what they thought it had become.