Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (Telugu: దబ్బాల రాజగోపాల్ రెడ్డి; born 13 June 1937 in Katur, Madras Presidency, British India, now in Andhra Pradesh, India) is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He completed a BEng at the University of Madras, an MTech at the University of New South Wales, and a PhD at Stanford University under John McCarthy. Reddy is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, with primary research interests in artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-computer interaction.^[56]

He has served on the faculty of Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University for over 50 years, and was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.^{[56,35,58,53,54]} He served as the founding chairman of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and was instrumental in helping to create the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India to cater to the educational needs of low-income, gifted, rural youth.^[14,53,54] His students include James K. Baker, Alexander Waibel, James Gosling, Janet M. Baker, Kai-Fu Lee, Xuedong Huang, Roni Rosenfeld, Harry Shum, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon.^[55]

In 1994, he and Edward Feigenbaum won the ACM Turing Award, sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of computer science, for their work in the field of artificial intelligence, making Reddy the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award. His other awards and honors include the Legion of Honor (1984), the Padma Bhushan (2001), the Okawa Prize (2004), the Honda Prize (2005), and the Vannevar Bush Award (2006).

Raj Reddy was born into a Telugu family in Katur village of Chittoor district in present-day Andhra Pradesh, India. His father, Sreenivasulu Reddy, was a landowner, and his mother, Pitchamma, was a homemaker. He was the first person in his family to attend college.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy (presently Anna University, Chennai, affiliated to the University of Madras), he traveled to Australia as an intern. While studying at the University of New South Wales, he began using an English Electric Deuce Mark II computer, which utilized vacuum tubes, mercury delay line memory, and punch card I/O. After graduating with an MTech degree from UNSW in 1960, he joined IBM, where he worked as an Applied Science representative. In 1963, he joined Stanford University, graduating in 1966 as the first PhD in AI under John McCarthy. Following three years on the faculty at Stanford, he joined Carnegie Mellon University to work alongside AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herb Simon.^[9,57]

From 1960, Reddy worked for IBM in Australia.^[56] He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1966 to 1969.^[10] He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty as an associate professor of Computer Science in 1969, becoming a full professor in 1973 and a university professor in 1984.^[11] He is the University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and Moza Bint Nasser Chair at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.^[35]

Reddy was the founding director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of the School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999. As 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 was one of the founders of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and served as its president from 1987 to 1989.^[17] Reddy also served as a co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.^[16,1] He is the chairman of the Governing Council of IIIT Hyderabad and was the founding Chancellor of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT) from 2008 to 2019.^[15] He served on the International board of governors of the Peres Center for Peace in Israel.^[19] Additionally, he served as a member of the governing councils of EMRI and HMRI, which use technology-enabled solutions to provide cost-effective health care coverage to rural populations in India.^[59]

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.^[22] His AI research concentrated on perceptual and motor aspect of intelligence such as speech, language, vision and robotics. Reddy and his colleagues have made seminal contributions to Task Oriented Computer Architectures, Analysis of Natural Scenes, Universal Access to Information, and Autonomous Robotic Systems.^{[69,66,67,68]}

Over a span of five decades, Reddy and his colleagues created several demonstrations of spoken language systems, e.g., voice control of a robot, large vocabulary connected speech recognition, speaker independent speech recognition, and unrestricted vocabulary dictation.^{[65,60,24,62]} Hearsay I was 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.^[70,71] Some of these ideas—most notably the "blackboard model" for coordinating multiple knowledge sources—have been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence.^[69]

Reddy's other major research interest has been exploring the role of "Technology in Service of Society". One of the early efforts was founded by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in France in 1981, with a technical team consisting of Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Raj Reddy, and Terry Winograd. Reddy served as the Chief Scientist for the center, which had the objective of developing human resources in Third World countries using information technology. Several seminal experiments in providing computerized classrooms and rural medical delivery were attempted, and in 1984, President Mitterrand decorated Reddy with the Légion d'Honneur medal.^[72,73,74]

In the 1990s, the Universal Digital Library Project was started by Raj Reddy, Robert Thibadeau, Jaime Carbonell, Michael Shamos, and Gloriana S. Clair to scan books and other media—such as music, videos, paintings, and newspapers—and provide online access to all creative works to anyone, anywhere at any time.^[75] A larger Million Book Project was subsequently started in 2001 as a collaborative effort with China (Professors Pan Yunhe, Yuting Zhuang, Gao Wen) and India (Prof N. Balakrishnan).

Noting that a student's marks result from factors such as teacher quality, parents' education level, the ability to pay for coaching classes, and the time spent learning the subject, Reddy recognized that rural students tend to be at a serious disadvantage along each of these dimensions. Based on the premise that nationwide merit-based admissions like SAT tests are flawed and fail to provide a level playing field for gifted rural youth, Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT) was created in 2008 for educating gifted rural youth in Andhra Pradesh by Drs. Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, K. C. Reddy, and Raj Reddy.^[78] Reddy proposed that a fully connected population makes it possible to envision a KG-to-PG-Online-College in every village providing personalized instruction.^[79,80] Assuming all students receive digital literacy and learning-to-learn training during primary education before dropping out, anyone could learn any subject at any age even in the absence of qualified teachers on the topic.

Reddy also advocated using AI to empower people at the bottom of the pyramid who have not benefited from the IT revolution so far.^[81] He proposed that recent advances in AI will ultimately enable anyone to watch any movie, read any textbook, and talk to anyone independent of the language of the producer or consumer.^[82] Additionally, he proposed that Smart Sensor Watches could be utilized to eliminate COVID lockdowns by monitoring sensor data to identify and isolate individuals with symptoms.^[83]

His works include "Machine Intelligence and Robotics: Report of the NASA Study Group – Executive Summary, Final Report", published by NASA JPL in September 1979 with Carl Sagan as chair, Raj Reddy as vice chair, and others.^[43] He also presented the 1988 AAAI Presidential Address, titled "Foundations and Grand Challenges of Artificial Intelligence".^[3]

In 1984, Reddy was awarded the French Legion of Honour by French President François Mitterrand.^{[72,73,74,37]} In 1994 he and Edward Feigenbaum received the Turing Award, "for pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology."^[36] Reddy also received the Padma Bhushan from the President of India in 2001, the Okawa Prize in 2004, the Honda Prize in 2005, and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2006.^[42,92,4]

He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, and Computer History Museum.^{[88,89,84,86]} Reddy is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, Indian National Science Academy, and Indian National Academy of Engineering. He has been awarded honorary doctorates (Doctor Honoris Causa) from SV University, Universite Henri-Poincare, University of New South Wales, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, University of Massachusetts, University of Warwick, Anna University, IIIT (Prayagraj), Andhra University, IIT Kharagpur, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, and Carnegie Mellon University.^{[35,90,7,8,91]}