Raj Reddy

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Guindy Engineering College (established in 1794) of the University of Madras, he went to Australia as an intern.

While a student at the University of New South Wales, he started using an English Electric Deuce Mark II computer (Vacuum Tube, Mercury Delay line memory with punch card I/O).

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award.

He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years.

He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth.

He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

After graduating with an MTech degree from UNSW in 1960, he joined IBM where he worked as an Applied Science representative.

From 1960, he worked for IBM in Australia.

In 1963 he joined Stanford University, graduating in 1966 as the first PhD in AI under John McCarthy.

After 3 years on the Faculty at Stanford, he joined Carnegie Mellon University to work with AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herb Simon.

Reddy is the University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and Moza bint Nasser Chair at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1966 to 1969.

He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty as an associate professor of Computer Science in 1969.

Reddy's early research was conducted at the AI labs at Stanford, first as a graduate student and later as an assistant professor, and at CMU since 1969.

His AI research concentrated on perceptual and motor aspect of intelligence such as speech, language, vision and robotics.

Over a span of five decades, Reddy and his colleagues created several historic demonstrations of spoken language systems, e.g., voice control of a robot, large vocabulary connected speech recognition, speaker independent speech recognition, and unrestricted vocabulary dictation.

Reddy and his colleagues have made seminal contributions to Task Oriented Computer Architectures, Analysis of Natural Scenes, Universal Access to Information, and Autonomous Robotic Systems.

Hearsay I was one of the first systems capable of continuous speech recognition.

Subsequent systems like Hearsay II, Dragon, Harpy, and Sphinx I/II developed many of the ideas underlying modern commercial speech recognition technology as summarized in his recent historical review of speech recognition with Xuedong Huang and James K. Baker.

Some of these ideas—most notably the "blackboard model" for coordinating multiple knowledge sources—have been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence.

Reddy's other major research interest has been in exploring the role of "Technology in Service of Society".

He became a full professor in 1973 and a university professor, in 1984.

He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999.

As a dean of SCS, he helped create the Language Technologies Institute, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (since renamed as the Machine Learning Department), and the Institute for Software Research.

One of the early efforts, was founded by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in France in 1981 with a technical team consisting of Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Raj Reddy, and Terry Winograd.

Reddy served as the Chief Scientist for the center.

The centre had as its objective the Development of Human Resource in Third World Countries using Information Technology.

Several seminal experiments in providing computerized classrooms and rural medical delivery were attempted.

In 1984, President Mitterrand decorated Reddy with the Légion d'Honneur medal.

He was one of the founders of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and was its president from 1987 to 1989.

He served on the International board of governors of Peres Center for Peace in Israel.

He served as a member of the governing councils of EMRI and HMRI which use technology-enabled solutions to provide cost-effective health care coverage to rural population in India.

Universal Digital Library Project was started by Raj Reddy, Robert Thibadeau, Jaime Carbonell, Michael Shamos, and Gloriana S. Clair in the 1990s, to scan books and other media such as music, videos, paintings, and newspapers and to provide online access to all creative works to anyone, anywhere at any time.

He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

Raj Reddy was born in a Telugu family in Katur village of Chittoor district of present-day Andhra Pradesh, India.

His father, Sreenivasulu Reddy, was a landowner, and his mother, Pitchamma, was a homemaker.

He was the first member of his family to attend college.

Reddy was a co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.

He is the chairman of Governing Council of IIIT Hyderabad. He was the founding Chancellor (2008-2019) of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT).