The technology behind today's voice assistants has roots in the work of Dr Dabbala Rajagopal “Raj” Reddy, an Indian-born American computer scientist who grew up in a small village in Andhra Pradesh and went on to become a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
Reddy, who hails from Katur village, faced financial hardships during his childhood. Reports say he often attended a one-room school barefoot until he was 16. With paper and pencils too expensive for his family, he practised writing by tracing letters in the sand.
Despite these challenges, Reddy went on to become the first person of Asian origin to receive the ACM Turing Award, widely regarded as computing's highest honour. His pioneering work on continuous speech recognition helped lay the groundwork for the voice-based technology used in modern digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa.
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Dr. Reddy's Journey
Widely regarded as the father of AI in India, Dr. Reddy was born in 1937. Coming from a humble background, his father was an agricultural landlord and his mother, Pitchamma, was a homemaker. He completed his high school from ZP High School at Sri Kalahasti in Chittoor District and went on to study civil engineering from Guindy College of Engineering, Madras (now Anna University, Chennai).
Later, he moved to Australia as an exchange student and received a Master's degree in technology in 1960 from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, according to A.M. Turing Award website. Reddy completed his PhD dissertation in 1966 from Stanford University.
Dr. Reddy's contributions to AI
According to the award website, he pioneered the construction of systems for recognizing continuous speech. He is credited with building the first of such systems, Hearsay I. Many of his additional models have also been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence.
Dr. Reddy advanced artificial intelligence and computer science through his research at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. His contributions span across speech recognition, image processing, robotics, and autonomous systems.
He led the Robotics Institute at the university as its founding director and helped establish Pittsburgh as a major centre for robotics research and innovation. The institute's headquarters building is sometimes affectionately called the “Raj Mahal” in honour of its founder, according to A.M. Turing website.
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As per the university website, Dr. Reddy has received numerous honours for his contributions to robotics and AI field, including the Padma Bhushan in 2001, a top civilian honour in India; Legion of Honor, Okawa Prize, Honda Prize, and Vannevar Bush Award. He is a fellow of several prestigious organisations as well as a member of leading academies.
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