Anima Anandkumar

• Year

  2023

• Program

  AI2050

• Institution

  California Institute of Technology

• Location

  USA

Anima Anandkumar saw the potential for AI to revolutionize scientific domains and focused her research on this area. Her AI algorithms enable and accelerate a wide range of scientific applications, including weather forecasting, autonomous drone flight, and drug design. To enable these applications, she proposed neural operators which learn in function spaces and can simulate complex multi-scale processes, such as fluid dynamics and material properties, orders of magnitude faster. She also did seminal work on tensor methods for unsupervised learning of latent-variable probabilistic models to capture structures in text and social networks.

Anima is a fellow of IEEE and ACM, and is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network. She has received several awards, including the Guggenheim and Alfred P. Sloan fellowships, the NSF Career award, and best paper awards at venues such as Neural Information Processing and the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research.

She received her B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and her Ph.D. from Cornell University and did her postdoctoral research at MIT. She was principal scientist at Amazon Web Services, and is now senior director of AI research at NVIDIA, and Bren named professor at Caltech.