Artificial intelligence (AI) was formally invented and named by John McCarthy, an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He is often hailed as the "father of artificial intelligence" because he coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 and organized the seminal Dartmouth Conference in 1956, which marked the birth of AI as a field of study. McCarthy also developed the Lisp programming language, which became essential for AI research. However, foundational theoretical groundwork for AI was laid earlier by Alan Turing, who proposed the concept of machines simulating human intelligence and formulated the famous Turing Test in 1950 to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.