Raj Reddy

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. 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. 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.