Symposium on AI and CS in the 21st Century To Mark the 60th Birthday of SCS' Dean Reddy

The School of Computer Science (SCS) will honor its dean, Raj Reddy, with a symposium, titled "Inventing the Future: AI (artificial intelligence) and CS (computer science) in the 21st Century," to celebrate his 60th birthday. The symposium will be held June 4-5 in the University Center.

About two dozen experts from academia and industry will speak about areas in which Reddy has had substantial influence, including AI, speech technologies, language technologies, computer vision, digital libraries, computer systems and robotics.

The event is being hosted by President Jared L. Cohon and Provost Paul Christiano with support from SEEC Corp. and Carnegie Group, Inc. Symposium chairmen are Pradeep Khosla, director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), Jim Morris, head of the Computer Science Department, and Takeo Kanade, director of the Robotics Institute.

"AI and computer science have had a profound impact on society during the last four decades," Khosla said. "Raj has been an influential figure in the computer science community nationally and internationally as well as at Carnegie Mellon. This symposium is an opportunity for reviewing past successes and failures as well as future challenges in the fields where he has left his mark."

Distinguished speakers at the seminar will include Robert Kahn, "father" of the Internet, who is now chairman, CEO and president of the Center for New Research Initiatives; Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tom Murrin, dean of the A. J. Palumbo School of Business Administration at Duquesne University.

The symposium's seven sessions will be chaired and attended by some of the university's most distinguished faculty members, including Khosla; Morris; Richard Stern, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate director of the Information Networking Institute; Roni Rosenfeld, assistant professor in the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery; Mary Shaw, the A.J. Perlis professor and associate dean of the Computer Science Department; Dan Siewiorek, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate director of ICES; and Chuck Thorpe, principal research scientist in the Robotics Institute.

Several of Reddy's close associates will be panel members. Among them is Ed Feigenbaum, the Kumagai professor of computer science at Stanford University, with whom Reddy shared the 1994 Turing award for "pioneering the design and construction of large-scale AI systems and demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of this technology."

Ed Fredkin of Radnet, Inc., who will be on the Artifical Intelligence Grand Challenges panel with Feigenbaum, established the three-tiered Fredkin Prize for computer chess in 1980. The $100,000 grand prize was shared last summer by the team that built Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat world champion Garry Kasparov.

James Baker, chairman and CEO of Dragon Systems, Inc., one of the country's premier speech recognition firms, developed the original DRAGON speech recognition system while studying for his doctor's degree in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Reddy was Baker's thesis adviser.

Reddy, the Herbert A. Simon professor of computer science and robotics, is recognized worldwide for his work in speech recognition and as the founder of the university's Robotics Institute, which he directed from its inception in 1980 until he bcame dean of SCS in 1992.

Morris said Reddy's contributions in speech recognition began in the early '70s when his group at Carnegie Mellon produced several exploratory prototype systems, which have guided the field for two decades.

"In the '80s Raj saw the great opportunity of robotics and created and guided the Robotics Institute," Kanade said. "Under his guidance, it has grown to a dominant research organization that explores a huge spectrum of hard scientific and engineering problems, including manipulation, vision, image processing, manufcaturing technology and autonomous vehicles."

Further testimony to Reddy's leadership came with his election to the National Academy of Engineering and the presidency of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

On the international scene, Reddy was presented the Legion of Honor by President Francois Mitterrand of France for his work with Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaine, an organization that works to bring advanced technology to developing countries.

For more information, visit the symposium's Web site at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~raj-symposium/.

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