Whenever Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu speaks about bringing IT to the state, he mentions a Raj Reddy who helped him with setting up the International Institute of Information Technology. Dabbala Rajagopal Reddy, popularly known as Raj Reddy, is one of the greatest scientists to have ever come out of India and is the recipient of computer science’s highest honour, the AMTuring Award in 1994. Reddy received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Madras in 1958 and went on to receive a master’s from the University of New South Wales in Australia. After a short stint at IBM, he moved to the US to pursue a PhD in speech recognition at the Stanford University. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at the university, he moved to Carnegie Mellon as faculty in 1969 and founded the University’s Robotics Institute. Over the next 30 years he acted as the Dean of School of Computer Science and founded many institutes at the same university. Along with developing Hearsay I, the first system capable of continuous speech recognition over a very long career, he has done pioneering work in robotics, AI, space robotics and computer graphics. Among the numerous awards he has got is the ‘Legion d’Honneur’ by the French President in 1984.