Ashok K. Chandra (30 July 1948 – 15 November 2014) was a
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
at
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, United States, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center. Chandra received his PhD in
Computer Science from
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, an MS from
University of California, Berkeley, and a BTech from
IIT Kanpur.
He was previously Director of Database and Distributed Systems at
IBM Almaden Research Center.
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 and
Larry Stockmeyer),
conjunctive queries in databases (with Philip M. Merlin), computable queries (with
David Harel
David Harel ( he, דוד הראל; 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 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 and
Richard J. Lipton).
He was a founder of the annual
IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science and served as conference chair of the first three conferences, in 1986–8.
He was an
IEEE Fellow.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chandra, Ashok K.
IIT Kanpur alumni
Stanford University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Microsoft Research people
Microsoft employees
IBM employees
Fellow Members of the IEEE
1948 births
2014 deaths