With Prof Raj Reddy, AI comes talking to PEC, Chandigarh — Dreaming the Possible Dream
With Prof Raj Reddy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes talking to PEC, Chandigarh — Dreaming the Possible Dream
A brief insight into the leaves of life of a Civil Engineer turned a Global pioneer of AI
Tejinder Singh Bedi
@tsinghbedi
(From the Pen of a PEC Alum of 1973)
Recipient of the prestigious ACM Turing Award (known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science) and the Legion of Honour, University Professor of CS & Robotics and Moza Bint Naseer Chair at the School of Computer Science in the Carnegie Mellon University, (CMU), Padma Bhushan Prof Raj Reddy will be with the PEC Alums, its faculty & students on the 11th November from 5 PM to 6.30 PM as PEC — the Punjab Engineering College of Chandigarh kicks off its year long lecture series commemorating the grand ceremonies of its entry into its 100th year of growth since inception in 1921.
And what better topic to start with on the kick off day than our National Education Policy 2020 & Post COVID Consequences & Options.
One of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, 83 year old (born June13, 1937) Prof Reddy is an Indian American computer scientist., who has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over half a century.
Founding Director of the Robotics Institute at the CMU , he has also been instrumental in helping to create the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. back home. He is also the chairman of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.
Prof. Reddy is the first person of Asian origin to have received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 for his work in AI.
Born in a Telugu family in Katur, Chittoor District, Madras Presidency — now in AP, to a farmer father Sreenivasulu Reddy and home-maker mother Pitchamma, Reddy was the first member of his family to attend college! Reddy went on to complete his Civil Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, University of Madras — now affiliated to Anna University in 1958 before completing his MEng from University of New South Wales, Australia in 1960 and earning his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1966. Prof Reddy worked for IBM in Australia after his PG and then as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University from 1966 to 1969 before joining the Carnegie Mellon faculty as an associate professor of Computer Science in 1969, a full professor in 1973 and a university professor, in 1984. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 till 1991 and the Dean of the School of Computer Science thereafter till 1999.
As a dean of SCS Prof Reddy 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 a co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001 and one of the founders of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence besides being its president from 1987 to 1989.He has also served on the international board of governors of Peres Center for Peace in Israel and 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 population in India. He has also contributed to the Million Books project as part of Digital Library of India.
Some Highlights of the Research of Prof Reddy
His AI research concentrated on perceptual and motor aspects of intelligence such as speech, language, vision and robotics. Over a span of five decades, Reddy and his colleagues are reported to have created several historic 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.
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. 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. Some of these ideas — most notably the ‘blackboard model’ for coordinating multiple knowledge sources — have been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence. His other major research interest has been in exploring the role of ‘Technology in Service of Society’.
(Thanks Wikipedia for access to the large data base always being constantly update — moving with the Universe)