Raj Reddy

Raj Reddy was born in Katur, Chittoor district, Madras Presidency, British India. His father, Sreenivasulu Reddy, was a farmer, and his mother, Pitchamma, was a homemaker. He was the first member of his family to attend college.

He received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy,[5] then affiliated to the University of Madras (now to Anna University, Chennai), India, in 1958,[6] and a MTech degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1966.[7]

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.[4] He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1966 to 1969.[8] 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.[9]

He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute[10] from 1979[11] to 1991[12] 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.[13]

Reddy was a co-chair[14] of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.[15] He was one of the founders of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence[16] and was its President from 1987 to 1989.[17] He served on the International board of governors of Peres Center for Peace in Israel.[18] He served as a member of the governing councils of EMRI[19] and HMRI[20] which use technology-enabled solutions to provide cost-effective health care coverage to rural population in India.

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.[6] 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,[21] large vocabulary connected speech recognition,[22][23] speaker independent speech recognition,[24] and unrestricted vocabulary dictation.[25] Reddy and his colleagues have made seminal contributions to Task Oriented Computer Architectures,[26] Analysis of Natural Scenes,[27] Universal Access to Information,[28] and Autonomous Robotic Systems.[29] 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.[30]

Some of these ideas—most notably the "blackboard model" for coordinating multiple knowledge sources—have been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence. His other major research interest has been in exploring the role of "Technology in Service of Society".[29] An early attempt in this area was the establishment, in 1981, of the Centre mondial informatique et ressource humaine in France by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and a technical team of Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert and Terry Winograd. Reddy served as the Chief Scientist for the center.[31]

His awards and recognitions include the following:

• He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, Acoustical Society of America, and IEEE.
• Reddy is a member[12] of the United States National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, Indian National Science Academy, and Indian National Academy of Engineering.
• He has been awarded honorary doctorates (Doctor Honoris Causa) from SV University, Universite Henri-Poincare, University of New South Wales,[32] Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, University of Massachusetts,[33] University of Warwick,[34] Anna University, IIIT (Allahabad), Andhra University, IIT Kharagpur[35] and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.[36]
• In 1994 he and Edward Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award "For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology".[37]
• In 1984, Reddy was awarded the French Legion of Honour by French President François Mitterrand for his contributions as Chief Scientist at "Centre Mondial Informatique" in Paris in the use of "Technology in Service of Society".[31]
• In 2001, Reddy was awarded Padma Bhushan, an award given by the Indian government that recognizes distinguished service of a high order to the nation.[38]
• In 2004, Reddy received the | Okawa Prize for pioneering researches of large-scale artificial intelligence system, human-computer interaction and Internet, and outstanding contributions to information and telecommunications policy and nurture of many human resources.[39]
• He received the 2005 IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award For, "His outstanding service to the AI community as President of AAAI, Conference Chair of IJCAI-79, and his leadership and promotion of AI internationally". He received the IBM Research Ralph Gomory Visiting Scholar Award in 1991.
• In 2005, Reddy received the | Honda Prize for his pioneering role in robotics and computer science which are expected to be used in the future society for a broad range of applications including education, medicine, healthcare, and disaster relief.[40]
• In 2006 he received the Vannevar Bush Award, the highest Award of National Science Foundation in United States, for his lifetime contribution to science and long-standing statesmanship in science and behalf of the nation.[41]
• In 2008, Reddy received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, "for leadership and pioneering contributions to speech recognition, natural language understanding, and machine intelligence".[42]
• In 2011, Reddy was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".[43][44]

• Machine Intelligence and Robotics: Report of the NASA Study Group — Executive Summary,[45] Final Report[46] Carl Sagan (chair), Raj Reddy (vice chair) and others, NASA JPL, September 1979
• Foundations and Grand Challenges of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Presidential Address, 1988.[17]
• To Dream the Possible Dream, Turing Award Lecture presented at ACM CS Conference, 1 March 1995[47]
• He contributed to the Million Books project as part of Digital Library of India.[48]

• Kai-Fu Lee's 2018 bestseller 'AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order' is dedicated "To Raj Reddy, my mentor in AI and in life"

Media related to Raj Reddy at Wikimedia Commons

• Raj (Dabbala Rajagopal) Reddy at the Mathematics Genealogy Project