Raj Reddy

Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy is an Indian-born American computer scientist and one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, who spent more than fifty years on the faculty of Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded the Robotics Institute. Reddy research concentrated on the perceptual and motor aspects of intelligence, including speech, language, vision and robotics, and he led development of pioneering speech recognition systems including Hearsay and Sphinx. Beyond his technical research, Reddy helped establish institutions to widen access to computing education, including the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies for gifted rural students in India and the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, where he served as founding chairman. Reddy shared the ACM Turing Award with Edward Feigenbaum in 1994 for pioneering the design and construction of large-scale artificial intelligence systems, becoming the first person of Asian origin to receive the award, and he also received India Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2006.