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.
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.