Ashok K. Chandra

Ashok K. Chandra (30 July 1948 – 15 November 2014)^[2] was a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California, United States, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center.^[3] Chandra received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, 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.

Ashok K. Chandra
Born	(1948-07-30)30 July 1948
Died	15 November 2014(2014-11-15) (aged 66) California, United States
Alma mater	Berkeley
Known for	Conjunctive queries, alternating Turing machines
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	IBM Research Microsoft Research
Doctoral advisor	Zohar Manna[1]

Chandra co-authored several key papers in theoretical computer science. Among other contributions, he introduced alternating Turing machines in computational complexity (with Dexter Kozen and Larry Stockmeyer),^[4][5] conjunctive queries in databases (with Philip M. Merlin),^[6] computable queries (with David Harel),^[7] and multiparty communication complexity (with Merrick L. Furst and Richard J. Lipton).^[8]

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.^[9] He was an IEEE Fellow.^[10]