Raj Reddy: Difference between revisions

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born June 13, 1937) is one of the early pioneers in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)^[1] for over 40 years. He was the founding Director of the Robotics Institute and the Dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at CMU. 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.

Dr. Raj Reddy was born in Katur, Andhra Pradesh, India. He received a BE degree from the College of Engineering, Guindy (now part of Anna University), India in 1958 and a MTech degree in Civil Engineering from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1966. He was the first doctoral student to graduate at Stanford under Turing Award winner and AI pioneer, John McCarthy.

Dr. Reddy is the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1960-63, Dr. Reddy worked as an Applied Science Representative for IBM Corp., in Australia. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford from 1966-69. He joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty as an Associate Professor of Computer Science in 1969. He became a Full Professor in 1973, and a University Professor in 1984.

He served as the founding Director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and as the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999. As a Dean of SCS, he was instrumental in creating Language Technologies Institute, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (since renamed as Department of Machine Learning), and Institute for Software Research. He is the Chairman of Governing Council of IIIT Hyderabad and he is the Chancellor and the Chairman of Governing Council of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, 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. His AI research concentrated on perceptual and motor aspect of intelligence such as speech, language, vision and robotics. In speech, he and his colleagues developed large vocabulary connected speech recognition system named Hearsay and Harpy as part of the DARPA speech understanding research program. Since then the CMU team has been responsible for many advances in speech research and the graduates from CMU went on to become leaders in the field.

His other major research interest has been in exploring the role of “Technology in Service of Society”. An early attempt in this area was the establishment, in 1981, of “Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaines” in France by Jean Jacques Servan Schreiber and a technical team of Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Seymour Pappert and Terry Winograd. Raj Reddy served as the Chief Scientist for the center and was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by President Mitterrand in 1984. More recently he has been active in establishment of a universal digital library to provide anytime anywhere access to creative works of human race, a university for the gifted rural poor in India, and providing access to healthcare information to illiterate people using ICT..

Reddy's foreword for the widely used book "Spoken Language Processing" by Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon highlighted his close ties with Microsoft's speech brains. Prof. Reddy has received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Technical Field Award, "for leadership and pioneering contributions to speech recognition, natural language understanding, and machine intelligence."^[2]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Raj Reddy.

• Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), India) - Reddy is on the Governing Board
• Raj Reddy's webpage at CMU
• Oral history interview with Raj Reddy at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Reddy discusses his work in artificial intelligence (AI), especially speech recognition, from his graduate work at Stanford University through his research as a principle investigator on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grants at Carnegie-Mellon University. Other topics include: the interaction of researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, DARPA funding of AI research, AI research from the 1960s to the 1980s.
• Raj Reddy's talk at Stanford about PCtvt (Quicktime)
• Raj Reddy - KurzweilAI's Big Thinkers
• Reddy receives Honda Prize - CMU release
• Raj Reddy talking about the Robotics Institute in 1986 episode of Computer Chronicles
• Raj Reddy receives 2006 Vannevar Bush Award for Lifetime Contributions to Science
• The Education Problem: Raj Reddy

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