Ashok K. Chandra

Ashok K. Chandra (1948 to 2014) was a computer scientist who worked at IBM Research and later at Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BTech from IIT Kanpur. Earlier in his career he was Director of Database and Distributed Systems at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Chandra co-authored several key papers in theoretical computer science. Among his contributions, he introduced alternating Turing machines in computational complexity together with Dexter Kozen and Larry Stockmeyer, conjunctive queries in databases with Philip M. Merlin, computable queries with David Harel, and multiparty communication complexity with Merrick L. Furst and Richard J. Lipton. He was a founder of the annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science and chaired its first three conferences, from 1986 to 1988. He was an IEEE Fellow.