AI pioneer Raj Reddy honoured by Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum

Bengaluru: Raj Reddy, an Indian-American professor and researcher, has been honoured by the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Silicon Valley as part of its 2021 Fellow Awards programme for his contribution towards revolutionising artificial intelligence and continuous speech recognition.
Raymond Ozzie, Lillian F. Schwartz and Andries van Dam were the three other awardees for 2021.

Reddy, who grew up in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, has had a five decade-long teaching career and founded The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He also played an instrumental role in setting up the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technology in Nuzvid, Andhra Pradesh.

“In this digital world, new technologies make it easier than ever to transfer knowledge and information and educate new audiences,” Reddy said. “... (I) am looking forward to seeing how future innovations build on legacy technologies to further advance speech recognition and AI for new use cases across banking, e-commerce, telehealth and so much more.”

The CHM Fellow Awards programme looks to honour tech pioneers for their contributions to the advancement of computing. The programme’s past winners include Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, Java creator James Gosling, and World Wide Web creator Tim Berners Lee.

“His expanding vision for speech understanding through technology has brought him one step closer to unlocking the true potential of artificial intelligence,” said Ed Feigenbaum, computer scientist, former professor and entrepreneur, who presented the award to Reddy. “Raj’s ability to connect information technology with people with no access to these resources makes him a great role model for all young scientists across geographies.”