Before he became a decorated pioneer of artificial intelligence, Raj Reddy grew up far from a computer lab. As a child in the 1940s, he lived in rural Katur, Andhra Pradesh, India. His one-room schoolhouse had no paper or pencils, so he learned to write letters in a plot of sand. On hot nights in a home with no electricity or running water, he and six siblings cooled off by dragging their mattresses outside.
“The sky was beautifully clear, and I could see all the stars,” said Reddy, who smiles easily. “People have asked, ‘Oh my God, were you that poor?’ But I never felt deprived at all.” On the advice of an astrologer, his father sent him to college, with tuition paid by his uncle. Reddy bought his first pair of shoes for the occasion.
Reddy’s first encounter with a computer came later, at the University of New South Wales in Australia, when he was pursuing his master’s degree in civil engineering. Immediately he put it to work solving integration problems, amazing a classmate in the process. “If you’re willing to let your mind wander,” he told the classmate, “you can come up with a solution.”
Reddy soon got a job at IBM, where he read a paper by John McCarthy, the computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence.” It changed the trajectory of his life. “That’s what I want to work on,” Reddy thought to himself. In 1963, he started as McCarthy’s doctoral student in the newly formed Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Reddy’s early research on computer speech recognition, human-computer interactions, and robotics — depicted in an early, homegrown documentary — launched a lifetime of revolutionary work in AI.
