Showing posts with label Turing Award. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Turing Award. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - Who Was Raj Reddy Or Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy?

 


 


Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (1937–) is an Indian American who has made important contributions to artificial intelligence and has won the Turing Award.

He holds the Moza Bint Nasser Chair and University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.

He worked on the faculties of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, two of the world's leading colleges for artificial intelligence research.

In the United States and in India, he has received honors for his contributions to artificial intelligence.

In 2001, the Indian government bestowed upon him the Padma Bhushan Award (the third highest civilian honor).

In 1984, he was also given the Legion of Honor, France's highest honor, which was created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte himself.

In 1958, Reddy obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Madras' Guindy Engineering College, and in 1960, he received his master's degree from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

In 1966, he came to the United States to get his doctorate in computer science at Stanford University.

He was the first in his family to get a university degree, which is typical of many rural Indian households.

He went to the academy in 1966 and joined the faculty of Stanford University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, where he stayed until 1969, after working in the industry as an Applied Science Representative at IBM Australia from 1960 to 1963.

He began working at Carnegie Mellon as an Associate Professor of Computer Science in 1969 and will continue to do so until 2020.

He rose up the ranks at Carnegie Mellon, eventually becoming a full professor in 1973 and a university professor in 1984.

In 1991, he was appointed as the head of the School of Computer Science, a post he held until 1999.

Many schools and institutions were founded as a result of Reddy's efforts.

In 1979, he launched the Robotics Institute and served as its first director, a position he held until 1999.

He was a driving force behind the establishment of the Language Technologies Institute, the Human Computer Interaction Institute, the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (now the Machine Learning Department), and the Institute for Software Research at CMU during his stint as dean.

From 1999 to 2001, Reddy was a cochair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC).

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) took over PITAC in 2005.

Reddy was the president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 1987 to 1989.

The AAAI has been renamed the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, recognizing the worldwide character of the research community, which began with pioneers like Reddy.

The former logo, acronym (AAAI), and purpose have been retained.

Artificial intelligence, or the study of giving intelligence to computers, was the subject of Reddy's research.

He worked on voice control for robots, speech recognition without relying on the speaker, and unlimited vocabulary dictation, which allowed for continuous speech dictation.

Reddy and his collaborators have made significant contributions to computer analysis of natural sceneries, job oriented computer architectures, universal access to information (a project supported by UNESCO), and autonomous robotic systems.

Reddy collaborated on Hearsay II, Dragon, Harpy, and Sphinx I/II with his coworkers.

The blackboard model, one of the fundamental concepts that sprang from this study, has been extensively implemented in many fields of AI.

Reddy was also interested in employing technology for the sake of society, and he worked as the Chief Scientist at the Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaine in France.

He aided the Indian government in the establishment of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, which focuses on low-income rural youth.

He is a member of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad's governing council.

IIIT is a non-profit public-private partnership (N-PPP) that focuses on technological research and applied research.

He was on the board of directors of the Emergency Management and Research Institute, a nonprofit public-private partnership that offers public emergency medical services.

EMRI has also aided in the emergency management of its neighboring nation, Sri Lanka.

In addition, he was a member of the Health Care Management Research Institute (HMRI).

HMRI provides non-emergency health-care consultation to rural populations, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, India.

In 1994, Reddy and Edward A. Feigenbaum shared the Turing Award, the top honor in artificial intelligence, and Reddy became the first person of Indian/Asian descent to receive the award.

In 1991, he received the IBM Research Ralph Gomory Fellow Award, the Okawa Foundation's Okawa Prize in 2004, the Honda Foundation's Honda Prize in 2005, and the Vannevar Bush Award from the United States National Science Board in 2006.

Reddy has received fellowships from the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, among other prestigious organizations.


~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Autonomous and Semiautonomous Systems; Natural Language Processing and Speech Understanding.


References & Further Reading:


Reddy, Raj. 1988. “Foundations and Grand Challenges of Artificial Intelligence.” AI Magazine 9, no. 4 (Winter): 9–21.

Reddy, Raj. 1996. “To Dream the Possible Dream.” Communications of the ACM 39, no. 5 (May): 105–12.






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