Template:Featured/Carlos Albert Cuadra
Carlos Cuadra (1925–2022) was an American information retrieval specialist.
Cuadra served in the Navy during World War II, stationed on Manus Island, south of Japan. He was a radio operator, decoding Morse code transmissions, and then was appointed Dean of the College of the Admiralties, managing the on-island school and teaching bookkeeping and photography. After the war he received a BA (1949) and a PhD (1953) at the University of California, Berkeley. Cuadra interned at the Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Palo Alto, CA, and then worked as a Research Supervisor at the VA Hospital in Downey, Illinois, training clinical psychology interns and conducting research.
Cuadra joined the RAND Corporation in 1956, helping the U.S. Air Force to train radar operators to watch for incoming Soviet Union planes or missiles. In 1957 he moved into a RAND spin off, the System Development Corporation (SDC), where he prepared trainers for the U.S. Air Force’s Semi- Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) automated air defense system. He also studied automated fingerprint identification and information processing operations at the Central Intelligence Agency. At SDC he led the development of successive retrieval services.