Anima Anandkumar

QuHarrison Terry presents Anima Anandkumar, Sr. Director of AI Research at NVIDIA and Bren Professor at Caltech, with the WTF Innovators Award for her extensive impact in the field of AI at the research and commercial levels.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “FourCast”, produced by Nimso, to Anima Anandkumar.

The Anima AI and Science Lab at Caltech envisions and builds principled foundations for AI in climate, flight, engineering, and medicine.

For example, their AI-based weather forecasting model is 45,000x faster than current models, allowing them to simulate future climate scenarios at a rapid rate. Their Fourier Neural Operator is able to run PDE simulations at 1000x speedups, allowing for accelerated simulation of fluid behaviors in engineering domains.

At NVIDIA, Anima’s research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning. In particular, she has spearheaded research in tensor-algebraic methods, large-scale learning, deep learning, probabilistic models, and non-convex optimization.

Summing up Anima Anandkumar’s impact on the field of AI without missing anything is difficult to say the least, considering the expansive volume of projects she oversees. She’s been at the forefront of designing better learning systems for AI. In her senior roles today, she is inspiring and nurturing the next great minds in machine learning to pursue and solve the greatest problems facing humanity. – QuHarrison Terry.

From 2016 to 2018, Anima was the Principal Scientist at Amazon AI, working on a range of large-scale machine learning solutions on AWS cloud. This included SageMaker platform for machine learning, the Apache Mxnet deep learning framework, and AI services such as Rekognition for computer vision and Lex & Comprehend for NLP.

Anima Anandkumar has received several honors such as the IEEE Fellowship, ACM Fellowship, Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Faculty Fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She has received best paper awards at venues such as NeurIPS and the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research. And she is part of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network.