Ravi Sethi

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Ravi Sethi (born 1947 is an Indian computer scientist retired from Bell Labs and currently president of Avaya Labs Research. He is best known as one of three authors of the classic computer science textbook Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, also known as the Dragon Book.

Ravi was born in 1947 in Murdana, Punjab in the midst of the violence caused by the partition of India. When he was only several days old, his father's colleague in the Pakistan Air Force took him to a safer place in India.

Later, he attended Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK), which provided him with a chance to excel when he and five other students were picked to help the professor teaching one of the first university computer courses ever taught in the country.

He went on to obtain a Ph.D. at Princeton University. He worked as an assistant professor at Penn State University, before joining Bell Labs in 1976.

While working for Bell Labs he was awarded the "Distinguished Technical Staff award", and in 1996 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Also in 1996 he was named research vice president in charge of computing and mathematical sciences and, additionally, in 1997, chief technical officer for Lucent’s Communications Software Group.