Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy

Dabbala Rajagopal, often known as Raj Reddy, is an Indian-American computer scientist and India’s first winner to get the Turing Award, often called the Nobel prize in computer science. He has served for Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years and is one of the earliest pioneers of artificial intelligence. He was also the founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The creation of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India wouldn’t be possible without him. He also became the chairman of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

Background and Education

Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy was born on the 13th of June in a family from Telugu in Andhra Pradesh and was the first person to attend college. His father, Sreenivasulu Reddy, served as a farmer, whereas his mother, Pitchamma, was an ordinary housewife.

He received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy, and completed his M.Eng degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in the late 1900s. He also earned his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in the late 1900s.

Career

The Indian- American computer scientist is currently employed as the University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. His life has always been full of ambitions and career-oriented. In the late 1900s, he worked for IBM in Australia, whereas from 1966 to 1969, he worked as the Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. As an Associate Professor of Computer Science, he also joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1969. He was the founder of the Robotics Institute, and he was also a Dean of the School of Computer Science. 

During his Dean period, he helped in the creation of a lot of institutes. He was a member of many health organisations in India to provide India’s rural population services. He used technology-enabled solutions to provide cost-effective healthcare coverage to rural people. He was the president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was a co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.

AI Research 

The Indian-American computer scientist conducted his early research at Stanford and then conducted his further study at Carnegie Mellon University in 1969. His research mainly considered the motor aspect of intelligence, such as speech, language and robotics. Over the years, with the help of his colleagues, Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy created several spoken language systems that focused on various aspects related to robots, such as voice, vocabulary etc. With the help of his colleagues, he made many contributions to computer architecture and easy access to information for many people, and the most major contribution was the first system proficient in non-stop speech recognition. Some of his ideas were adopted as the “blackboard model” for multiple knowledge sources and were also adopted in the books on artificial intelligence. After this incredible research, he was regarded as the earliest artificial intelligence pioneer.

Technology in Service of Society 

In 1981, the France Centre was the centre aimed at improving human resources in third-world countries using Information Technology. Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy became the major scientist for the centre. Reddy’s other major interest has been exploring the role of Technology in the Service of Society. In the 1990s, Reddy with his colleagues started Universal Digital Library Project to scan media, including various forms of media such as music, books etc. 

Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy helped create the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies for the welfare of rural students. This university provides them with all the faculties required by a normal student. Reddy made the best provisions possible to give education to India’s rural population. He believed every village should have online access to information, and every student should have digital literacy because the world is approaching the digital era. The students should have digital literacy to understand the upcoming period. 

Conclusion

Dabbala Rajagopal Raj Reddy always contributed the best for India and internationally; his contributions are quite well established. He introduced many new sciences like Machine Intelligence and Robotics. He also contributed to the executive summary, final report, and others for the report of the NASA Study Group. He also contributed to many substructures, Magnificent challenges of Artificial Intelligence, and many more. He was always referred to as the earliest pioneer of artificial intelligence. His contributions benefited the rural population, and always believed that disadvantaged rural students should get the required education. He was a great scientist.