Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider | Biography

J. C. R. Licklider was a computer scientist best known for his pioneering research in artificial intelligence and whose work established the technological basis for the concepts of time sharing and resource sharing.

Licklider was the only child of Joseph Parron Licklider, a teacher, and Margaret (Robnett) Licklider, a homemaker. After graduating from high school in 1933, Licklider enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis. He received an A.B. degree in psychology in 1937. He then matriculated in the graduate school at Washington and graduated in one year with an A.M. degree in psychology. In 1938 he entered the University of Rochester in New York, from which he received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1942. During World War II Licklider did research on hearing and speech communication in the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard University under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Research and Development and the National Defense Research Council.

In 1945 Licklider married Louise Carpenter Thomas; they had two children. That same year he received a nontenure appointment as a lecturer at Harvard University, where he remained until 1950. From 1948 to 1949 he was a consultant to the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory. In 1950 he was appointed as an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); he remained there for seven years as director of the Acoustics Laboratory. In his second year at MIT, Licklider was retained by the U.S. Air Force laboratories as a consultant in the fields of pitch perception and the intelligibility of speech. During the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, Licklider was an adviser to the Research and Development Board (1953-1954), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1954-1955), the committee on biotechnology and human research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Commission on Science and Technology. In recognition of his contributions to psychoacoustics and his distinguished government service, Licklider was elected president of the Acoustical Society of America in 1958.

Licklider left MIT in 1957 and joined the computer firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman as vice president and director of research of the departments of psychoacoustics, engineering psychology, and information systems. In 1962 he joined the U.S. Department of Defense as director of information processing research and behavioral science and as adviser to the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In these roles he was the driving force behind the Defense Department's move to fund large-scale research projects on the potential of information science at major postsecondary institutions in the United States. The first experimental computer science research center was established at MIT and was known as Project MAC, later the Laboratory for Computer Science.

In 1964 Licklider left the Department of Defense and became a consultant to IBM, where he was the director of information sciences, systems, and applications at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Westchester County, New York. In 1968 Licklider returned to MIT to direct Project MAC and as professor of electrical engineering. In 1974 he took a year's leave of absence to return to Washington with the Department of Defense, as director of the Information Processing Techniques Office. Licklider returned to MIT from government service in 1975 and remained there until his retirement in 1985, when he became emeritus professor. After his retirement he was awarded the prestigious Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service for his work in computer networking and the promotion of interaction between humans and computers.

Licklider served as president of the Society of Engineering Psychologists in 1960. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Psychological Association; he held elective memberships in the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Commission on Science and Technological Communication, and the National Academy of Engineering. He also served with distinction on the Board of Trustees of the Interuniversity Communications Council.

Licklider died at Symmes Hospital in Arlington, Massachusetts, of complications after an asthma attack. Interment was in Arlington.

Licklider was among the first academicians in the 1960s to recognize that the fullest potential of computers would be reached only if people were able to interact and network with them and that the computer was not only a depository of data but also could assist people in thinking, understanding, and making decisions. As humans think by manipulating, modifying, and combining schemata, Licklider argued, the use of computers in the learning process would allow people to create new, complex structures by rearranging old schemata.

According to Licklider, the body of human knowledge is created in a dynamic process involving repeated examinations and comparisons of very small and disparate pieces of data; if these data remain on the shelves of libraries in the form of books, the development of new knowledge is hindered. He maintained that for work with the body of knowledge to be fulfilled efficiently, synergic action is required, in which humans and computers work together. He coined the phrase, "man-computer interaction," to indicate that the body of human knowledge is a coordinate partner of people and computers. Man-computer interaction was perceived by Licklider as consisting of three mutually related components: first, man-machine interface, the physical medium through which the interaction takes place; second, the language aspects of man-computer interaction; and third, a look at the total method as an adaptive, self-organizing process.

Licklider also made many contributions in the application of computers to libraries, introducing the concepts of digital computers and telecommunications into the process of information storage and retrieval. Shortly before his retirement, he developed a system that made it possible to construct computer programs by drawing diagrams on a computer screen instead of writing numerical and symbolic expressions.