Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-born American computer scientist. 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. He and Edward Feigenbaum won the 1994 ACM Turing Award, sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of computer science, for their work in the field of artificial intelligence. Reddy was the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award.
Early life and education 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 in his family to attend college. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy (presently Anna University, Chennai, affiliated to 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). After graduating with an MTech degree from UNSW in 1960, he joined IBM where he worked as an Applied Science representative. 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.
Career
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. From 1960, he worked for IBM in Australia. 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. He became a full professor in 1973 and a university professor, in 1984. Reddy 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. 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). Reddy was a co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001. 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.
AI research 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 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.
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