Raj Reddy
Computer scientist, Turing Award 1994 for work on artificial intelligence
Born 1937
Photo: Vishnugsr · CC BY-SA 3.0
«Technology is the great equalizer. It can bring the best of education and information to the poorest of the poor.»
Raj Reddy built some of the first systems that could understand continuous spoken language, decades before voice assistants existed. He founded the world's first robotics institute and has spent much of his career on technology for the developing world.
Key achievements
- Turing Award, 1994, for large-scale artificial intelligence systems
- Founded the world's first Robotics Institute, 1979
- Took the first computer science PhD awarded by Stanford
Universities
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Professor since 1969, founder of the Robotics Institute in 1979, the first of its kind in the world.
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
Took the first PhD in computer science awarded by Stanford, in 1966, on speech recognition.
Facts
- He was the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award.
- His Hearsay II system from the 1970s introduced the blackboard architecture, still used in AI systems that combine many sources of evidence.
- He co-founded the Universal Digital Library project, which aimed to scan a million books and make them freely readable.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.