Raj Reddy

Raj Reddy pioneered the construction of systems for recognizing continuous speech. He developed the first system, Hearsay I, capable of continuous speech recognition. In this system and subsequent systems like Hearsay II, Harpy, and Dragon, he and his students developed most of the ideas underlying modern commercial speech recognition technology. Some of these ideas -- most notably the "blackboard model" for coordinating multiple knowledge sources -- have been adopted across the spectrum of applied artificial intelligence.

Together, Edward Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy have been seminal leaders in defining the emerging field of applied artificial intelligence and demonstrating its technological significance.