Anima Anandkumar

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing at Caltech and former Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA – the $2 trillion AI chip powerhouse.

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing at Caltech and former Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA – the $2 trillion AI chip powerhouse.

Anandkumar's groundbreaking research has transformed the AI industry with innovative algorithms like tensor algorithms, enabling efficient and scalable machine learning.

A little bit about her background:
Anandkumar graduated in Electrical Engineering from IIT in 2004 and earned her Ph.D. in the same field from Cornell University.

Here is a look at her career trajectory:
2010: Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine
2016: Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services, working on Lex - the service that now powers Amazon’s Alexa
2017: Professor at Caltech
2018: Director of AI Research at NVIDIA for 5 years

Recent accolades and awards:
* 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
* 2023 Schmidt Sciences AI 2050 Senior Fellow
* 2022 ACM Gordon-Bell special prize for COVID-19 research
* 2022 Outstanding Paper at Neural Information Processing

While many women (including myself) work on AI applications, a select few trailblazers like Anandkumar are pushing the very frontiers of AI research, constantly redefining what's possible.

Case in point: to accelerate scientific applications, Anandkumar has recently proposed an alternative to large language models, showcasing "neural operators" that integrate physical laws for more accurate and faster scientific simulations and predictions.

Applications range from weather forecasting to medical device design. At Nvidia, Anandkumar's team used neural operators to make a digital twin of the earth to predict climate change.

Now that's impactful, cutting-edge and downright cool.