bengaluru indianamerican researcher and professor raj reddy was presented with the computer history museum chm 2021 fellow award for his groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence ai robotics and computer science and speech recognition the chm 2021 fellow award honours extraordinary individuals for their achievement and contribution to computing and technology raymond ozzie former chief software architect at microsoft lillian f schwartz a pioneer in computermediated art and andries van dam a dutchamerican professor of computer science were the three other awardees for 2021 being selected to be a fellow of the computer history museum seems like you have become an antique reddy was quoted in an article on the carnegie mellon university cmu website after the museum announced the honour i guess when you have been working with computers for over six decades you do become ancient chm is a museum established in 1996 in mountain view california and presents stories and artifacts of the information age reddy was the founding director of cmus robotics institute and a former dean of the school of computer science a cmu article highlighted his achievements including developing the first system capable of recognising continuous speech initiating cmus autonomous vehicle programme and creating the universal digital library the last a free online digital library now includes more than 15 million volumes and book digitisation centres in china india egypt and the usthe chm website said for the 25 billion illiterate people in the world reddy seeks to apply his speech recognition technology to helping them access the worlds knowledge via the internet as well as promoting the use of ai in society reddy was also instrumental in helping to create rajiv gandhi university of knowledge technologies in india to meet the educational needs of lowincome gifted rural youthreddy who grew up in chittoor district in andhra pradesh received a be degree from the guindy engineering college of the university of madras in 1958 and a mtech degree from the university of new south wales australia in 1960 he received a phd degree in computer science from stanford university in 1966 reddy was a graduate student of ai legend and cofounder john mccarthy under whom he studied speech language vision and robotics from 1960 to 1963 reddy worked as an applied science representative for ibm in australia he was an assistant professor of computer science at stanford from 1966 to 1969reddy founded and led the robotics institute in 1979 the first robotics department at any us university developing it into a worldclass centre for robotics research and education in 1991 reddy became dean of the school of computer science at cmu a position he held until 1999 and in 1998 cmu became the first university in the world to offer a phd in roboticsreddy is a cofounder of the american association for artificial intelligence and is a winner of the 1994 acm turing award