Ashok K. Chandra (30 July 1948 – 15 November 2014) was a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

in Mountain View,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, United States, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center. Chandra received his PhD in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, an MS from

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and a BTech from

IIT Kanpur The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT- Kanpur or IIT-K) is a public institute of technology located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), it was declared an Institute of National Importance by th ...

. He was previously Director of Database and Distributed Systems at

IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters ...

. Chandra co-authored several key papers in theoretical computer science. Among other contributions, he introduced

alternating Turing machine In computational complexity theory, an alternating Turing machine (ATM) is a non-deterministic Turing machine (NTM) with a rule for accepting computations that generalizes the rules used in the definition of the complexity classes NP and co-NP ...

s in

computational complexity In computer science, the computational complexity or simply complexity of an algorithm is the amount of resources required to run it. Particular focus is given to computation time (generally measured by the number of needed elementary operations ...

(with

Dexter Kozen Dexter Campbell Kozen (born December 20, 1951) is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus and Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. Career Kozen received his BA in mathematics from ...

and

Larry Stockmeyer Larry Joseph Stockmeyer (1948 – 31 July 2004) was an American computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of computational complexity theory, and he also worked in the field of distributed computing. He died of pancreatic cance ...

), conjunctive queries in databases (with Philip M. Merlin), computable queries (with

David Harel David Harel (; born 12 April 1950) is a computer scientist, currently serving as President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980, and holds the Wil ...

), and multiparty

communication complexity In theoretical computer science, communication complexity studies the amount of communication required to solve a problem when the input to the problem is distributed among two or more parties. The study of communication complexity was first intro ...

(with

Merrick L. Furst Merrick may refer to: Places America * Merrick, New York, a hamlet and census-designated place * Merrick, West Springfield, a neighborhood in western Massachusetts * Merrick County, Nebraska * Merrick State Park, Wisconsin Antarctica * Merrick ...

and Richard J. Lipton). He was a founder of the annual

IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science The ACM–IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS) is an annual academic conference on the theory and practice of computer science in relation to mathematical logic. Extended versions of selected papers of each year's conference appear i ...

and served as conference chair of the first three conferences, in 1986–8. He was an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Chandra, Ashok K. IIT Kanpur alumni Stanford University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Microsoft Research people Microsoft employees IBM employees Fellows of the IEEE 1948 births 2014 deaths