Raj Reddy

Raj Reddy
Born Dabbala Rajagopal Reddy
(1937-06-13) June 13, 1937
Katur, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh, India)
Residence United States
Nationality Indian-American
Fields Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Human-Computer Interaction
Institutions Carnegie Mellon University
Stanford University
Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies
Alma mater College of Engineering, Guindy
University of New South Wales
Stanford University
Doctoral advisor John McCarthy
Doctoral students James K Baker[1]
Kai-Fu Lee[1]
Xuedong Huang
Harry Shum
Hsiao-wuen Hon
Notable awards Legion of Honor (1984)
Turing Award (1994)
Padma Bhushan (2001)
Vannevar Bush Award (2006)

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born June 13, 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 University for over 40 years.[2] 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 is also the chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the ACM Turing Award, in 1994, the highest award in Computer Science, for his work in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Life

Dabbala Rajagopal Reddy was born in Katur, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh, India. His father, Sreenivasulu Reddy, was an agricultural landlord, and his mother, Pitchamma, was a homemaker. He received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy of the University of Madras (now Anna University, Chennai), India, in 1958.[3] After that Reddy moved to Australia, and there he received a master's degree in technology from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He also received a doctorate degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1966.

On the same year he started his academic career as an assistant professor in the same university. After that he joined as a member of Carnegie Mellon University faculty in 1969. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at the University from 1979 to 1991.

Now, he lives in Pittsburgh with his wife of 50 years and they have two daughters. His daughters live on the West Coast. He visits his native country regularly to explore his passion of technology in service of society and to see his family who live in Bangalore.

Career

Reddy is the Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1960, Reddy worked for IBM in Australia.[2] He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1966 to 1969.[4] 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.[5]

He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute[6] from 1979[7] to 1991[8] 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[9] and he is the Chancellor and the chairman of the Governing Council of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, India.[10]

Reddy was a co-chair[11] of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.[12] He was one of the founders of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence[13] and was its President from 1987 to 1989.[14] He serves on the International board of governors of Peres Center for Peace in Israel.[15] He served as a member of the governing councils of EMRI[16] and HMRI[17] which use technology-enabled solutions to provide cost-effective health care coverage to rural population in India.

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.[3] His AI research concentrated on perceptual and motor aspect of intelligence such as speech, language, vision and robotics. Over a span of three decades, Reddy and his colleagues created several historic demonstrations of spoken language systems, e.g., voice control of a robot,[18] large vocabulary connected speech recognition,[19][20] speaker independent speech recognition,[21] and unrestricted vocabulary dictation.[22] Reddy and his colleagues have also made seminal contributions to Task Oriented Computer Architectures,[23] Analysis of Natural Scenes,[24] Universal Access to Information,[25] and Autonomous Robotic Systems.[26] Hearsay I is 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.[27]

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".[26] An early attempt in this area was the establishment, in 1981, of the fr: 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.[28]

Since 1995, Reddy and colleagues in China and India have worked on "Universal Digital Library Project".[25] The project is currently attempting to archive 1,000 newspapers for the next 1,000 years and provide online access to UNESCO heritage sites.

His current research centers around “Technology in Service of Society”, in particular creating voice only dialog based Apps for tasks such as online shopping and banking, online voting, a reading app that would read newspapers to people who cannot read, and dynamic realtime speech-to-speech translation of TV shows and lectures into local languages; all to enable semi-literate people in rural communities with connectivity and smart phones to benefit from advances in technology.

Awards and honors

His awards and recognitions include the following:

Contributions

References

  1. 1 2 "CMU Computer Science Ph.D. Awards by Advisor". Carnegie Mellon. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
  2. 1 2 "CMU's Raj Reddy fills lives with big questions". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. June 15, 1998. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  3. 1 2 "CMU-Software Engineering-Faculty-Raj Reddy". Carnegie Mellon. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  4. "Stanford Faculty List". Stanford.
  5. "CS50: FIFTY YEARS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE". Carnegie Mellon. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  6. "History of the Robotics Institute". Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  7. "Robotics Institute Founders". Carnegie Mellon University Article Dec. 2004, Vol. 1, No. 4. Retrieved 20 August 2011.
  8. 1 2 "Raj Reddy". rr.cs.cmu.edu. Archived from the original on July 9, 2011. Retrieved 24 July 2011.
  9. "Governing Council of International Institute of Information Technology". IIIT. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  10. "Governing Council of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technoloiges". RGUKT. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  11. "Draft Minutes of PITAC". Networking and Information Technology Research and Development(NITRD). Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  12. "Former PITAC Members (1997–2001)". Networking and Information Technology Research and Development(NITRD). Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  13. "Origins of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence". AAAI Magazine. 26 (4): 5–12.
  14. 1 2 "Foundations and Grand Challenges of Artificial Intelligence". AAAI Magazine. 9 (4): 9–21.
  15. "International Board of Governors of the Peres Center for Peace". Peres Center. Archived from the original on 20 July 2011.
  16. GVK EMRI – GVK Emergency Management and Research Institute – Governing Board
  17. http://www.hmri.in/gov-brd.aspx Archived 21 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
  18. "HearHere Video". CMU. Retrieved 2 September 2011.
  19. "Hearsay Video". CMU. Retrieved 2 September 2011.
  20. "Harpy Video". CMU. Retrieved 2 September 2011.
  21. Lee, Hon and Reddy (1990). "An Overview of the Sphinx Speech Recognition System.". IEEE Trans on ASSP. 38 (1): 35–44. doi:10.1109/29.45616.
  22. Introduction to Xuedong Huang, Alejandro Acero, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon (2001). Spoken language processing. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-022616-5.
  23. Bisiani, Mauersberg, and Reddy. "Task-Oriented Architectures". Proc. of the IEEE. 71 (7): 885–898. doi:10.1109/PROC.1983.12685.
  24. Ohlander, Price, Reddy (1978). "Picture Segmentation Using a Recursive Region Splitting Method". Computer Graphics and Image Processing. 8 (3): 313–333. doi:10.1016/0146-664X(78)90060-6.
  25. 1 2 "Electrifying Knowledge The Story of the Universal Digital Library_Pittsburgh Quarterly_Summer 2009 by Tom Imerito". CMU. Retrieved 4 September 2011.
  26. 1 2 "Robotics and Intelligent Systems in Support of Society". IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Systems. 21 (3): 24–31. 2006. doi:10.1109/MIS.2006.57.
  27. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/1/170863-a-historical-perspective-of-speech-recognition/fulltext
  28. 1 2 "NNDB Listing". NNDB. Retrieved 26 August 2011.
  29. "Honorary Degrees". University of New South Wales. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  30. "Honorary Degree". University of Massachusetts. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  31. "Honorary Graduates and Chancellor's Medallists". University of Warwick. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  32. "Honoris Causa Awardees". IIT-kgp. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  33. "HKUST to Confer Honorary Doctorates on Eminent Academics and Leaders". Press Release. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  34. "ACM Award Citation / Raj Reddy". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 25 July 2011.
  35. "Padma Bhushan Awardees — Padma Awards". india.gov.in. Retrieved 25 July 2011.
  36. "The Winners of the Okawa Prize". Okawa Foundation. Archived from the original on June 12, 2008. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
  37. "Honda Prize 2005". Honda Foundation. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
  38. "National Science Board — Honorary Awards — Vannevar Bush Award Recipients". nsf.gov. Retrieved 24 July 2011.
  39. "Speech Pioneer to Be Honored by IEEE". Speech Technology Magazine. 21 March 2008. Retrieved 14 December 2009.
  40. "AI's Hall of Fame" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. IEEE Computer Society. 26 (4): 5–15. 2011. doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.64.
  41. "IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Artificial Intelligence Leaders". DigitalJournal.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved September 18, 2011. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).
  42. Machine Intelligence and Robotics_Executive Summary (PDF). Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  43. Machine Intelligence and Robotics: Report of the NASA Study Group (PDF). Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  44. "To Dream the Possible Dream" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 39 (5): 105–112. May 1996. doi:10.1145/229459.233436.
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