Born in 1937 in the small village of Katoor in Andhra Pradesh, Dabbala Rajagopal “Raj” Reddy’s journey reads like a blueprint for modern tech ambition. The first in his family to attend college, he studied civil engineering in Chennai before travelling across continents—first to Sydney, then to Stanford—chasing a field so new it barely had a name: artificial intelligence.
At Stanford, he trained under AI’s founding mind, John McCarthy. But it was at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1970s that Reddy made his mark. His research group built some of the earliest systems capable of continuous speech recognition—Hearsay, Harpy, Dragon, Sphinx—technologies that would, decades later, become the backbone of Siri, Alexa, and voice interfaces billions now depend on.
Reddy wasn’t just building technology; he was building institutions. As the founding director of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and later Dean of its School of Computer Science, he helped establish iconic centers in language technologies, human–computer interaction, and machine learning. His students include innovators like James Gosling, creator of Java, and AI leader Kai-Fu Lee.
In 1994, Reddy became the first person of Asian origin to receive the ACM Turing Award, the tech world’s highest honour. Yet accolades were never his end goal. He spent the 2000s pushing technology for public good—digitizing over a million books through the Million Book Project and co-founding RGUKT in Andhra Pradesh to bring world-class tech education to rural youth.
Now in his late eighties, Reddy continues to speak about AI’s responsibility: not to replace humans, but to elevate them. From a quiet village in India to the forefront of global AI, his life charts a simple truth—vision, when coupled with purpose, can reshape the world.
