The Research Conference Where AI Began
1956
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a seminal event for artificial intelligence as a field.
Then:
In 1956, a small group of scientists gathered for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which was the birth of this field of research.
The initial meeting was organized by John McCarthy. In his proposal, he stated that the conference was “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.”
Professor of Philosophy James Moor says that the researchers who came to Hanover 50 years ago thought about ways to make machines more cognizant, and they wanted to lay out a framework to better understand human intelligence.
Now:
That legacy continues. In 2025, Dartmouth became the first Ivy League institution to launch AI at an institutional scale, partnering with Anthropic and AWS. Across campus, faculty are using AI to transform health care, detect deepfakes, and model climate change—while a Faculty Leadership Group ensures the technology serves Dartmouth’s educational mission, not the other way around.