William J. Perry, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies as well as the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor at Stanford University, and John McCarthy (1927–2011), a former Hoover fellow and a professor of computer science at Stanford, were among the seven former faculty and alumni who were selected as the 2012 Stanford Engineering Heroes.
“Established in 2010, the Heroes program celebrates the groundbreaking achievements of the most accomplished engineers associated with the Stanford School of Engineering and the profound effect engineering has on people's everyday lives” (Stanford Report).
Perry was the nineteenth secretary of defense for the United States, serving from February 1994 to January 1997. He previously served as deputy secretary of defense (1993–94) and as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (1977–81). He is an expert in US foreign policy, national security, and arms control.
McCarthy was a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence. Credited with coining the term artificial intelligence, he went on to define the discipline for more than five decades from his post at Stanford. In his career, he developed the programming language LISP, played computer chess via telegraph with opponents in Russia, and invented computer time-sharing, an advance that greatly improved the efficiency of distributed computing and predated cloud computing by decades. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (Stanford Report)
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