Anima Anandkumar

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Anima Anandkumar
Alma materIndian Institute of Technology Madras
Cornell University
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of California Irvine
California Institute of Technology
ThesisScalable Algorithms for Distributed Statistical Inference (2009)
Doctoral advisorLang Tong

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. She is a director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.

Education and early career[]

Anandkumar was born in Mysore. Her parents are both engineers, and her grandfather was a mathematician.[1] Her great great grandfather was the Sanskrit scholar R. Shamasastry. She began to study Bharatanatyam and she learnt this style of dancing for many years.[2] She studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and graduated in 2004.[1] She joined Cornell University for her graduate studies, earning a PhD under the supervision of Lang Tong in 2009. Her first project looked at distributed statistical estimation.[3] She was an IBM Fellow at Cornell University between 2008 and 2009. Her thesis considered Scalable Algorithms for Distributed Statistical Inference.[2] During her PhD she worked in the networking group at IBM on end-to-end service-level transactions. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2010, where she worked in the Stochastic Systems Group with Alan Willsky.[4]

Research[]

In 2010 Anandkumar joined University of California, Irvine, as an assistant professor. At the time, the technology industry was at the beginning of the big data revolution. Here she started working on tensor decompositions of latent variable models.[5] She joined Microsoft Research in New England as a visiting scientist in 2012. In 2013 she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to investigate big data and social networks.[6] She was made an assistant professor with tenure at UC Irvine in 2016.[7] She specialised in large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics.[8] Anandkumar was a Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services from 2016 to 2018.[9] She worked with the Apache MXNet tool, introducing new functionality and developing multi-modal processing algorithms.[9][10] She represented Amazon Web Services at the Anita Borg Institute in 2017, the Mulan forum for Chinese women entrepreneurs and Shaastra in 2018, discussing Deep Learning.[11][12] She also worked on Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly. She was involved with the launch of Amazon SageMaker, an opportunity for developers to use machine learning models.[12] Anandkumar joined the Machine Learning Conference Board of Advisors in 2018.[13] In 2018 Anandkumar joined NVIDIA as Director of Machine Learning Research, and Caltech as the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.[9][14][15] At NVIDIA she opened a new core laboratories in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Santa Clara.[16][17] She has pushed for governments to invest in robotics and artificial intelligence.[18] She spoke at the 2018 TEDxIndiana University about the algorithms she has developed to process big data.[19][20]

Diversity in technology[]

Anandkumar is committed to improving diversity in the technology sector. She launched a petition to Timothy A. Gonsalves to try and convince him at the Ministry of Human Resource Development to end gender segregation in the admissions process at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.[21] The petition calls for campus-wide systems to monitor sexual harassment, improved campus security and increased engagement with alumni.[21][22] She has spoken openly about her own experiences of sexual harassment on social media and called for Intel to stop using female acrobats as entertainment at their conference parties.[23] She was one of several campaigners to rename the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 'NIPS' as NeurIPS.[24] In 2018 she was awarded a New York Times Good Tech Award.[25]

Controversies[]

In December 2020, Anandkumar was embroiled in a Twitter controversy, when she published a list of individuals who liked or supported any Tweets made by Prof Pedro Domingos allegedly in relation to his controversial views on the renaming of NeurIPS, Timnit Gebru’s controversial exit at Google, algorithmic bias or cancel culture.[26] She suggested that followers "try and change the mind of [these] fanboys of Pedro[...] Especially junior people".[27] Following prompt backlash from individuals concerned about the circulation of such a blacklist, Anandkumar deleted her Twitter account and issued an apology stating "I am by no means perfect. I am sorry if my actions/words have ever created a threatening environment. My intention was to change hearts and minds, and to raise awareness to the struggles that women and minorities face both online and in the real world. I will find better ways to achieve that goal".[28]

Awards and honors[]

Anandkumar has won several awards and honours, including:[29]

References[]

  1. ^ a b "Contributors". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 54 (7): 3371–3382. 2008. doi:10.1109/TIT.2008.924739. ISSN 0018-9448.
  2. ^ a b Animashree., Anandkumar (2009). Scalable algorithms for distributed statistical inference. OCLC 458398906.
  3. ^ "Anima Anandkumar". DEEP LEARNING INDABA. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  4. ^ "Anima Anandkumar". Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference 2019. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  5. ^ Anandkumar, Anima; Ge, Rong; Hsu, Daniel; Kakade, Sham M.; Telgarsky, Matus (2012-12-08). "Tensor Decompositions for Learning Latent Variable Models". Fort Belvoir, VA. arXiv:1210.7559. Bibcode:2012arXiv1210.7559A. doi:10.21236/ada604494. S2CID 14587260. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. ^ a b "NSF Award Search: Award#1251267 - BIGDATA: Small: DA: DCM: Measurement and Learning in Large-Scale Social Networks". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  7. ^ "Anima Anandkumar". UCI Data Science Initiative. Archived from the original on 2015-03-05. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  8. ^ "Speakers | UCLA Anderson School of Management". www.anderson.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-01-08. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  9. ^ a b c "In the Research Spotlight: Anima Anandkumar". Amazon Web Services. 2017-05-16. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  10. ^ Lorica, Ben (2017-03-09). "Deep learning that's easy to implement and easy to scale". O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  11. ^ Amazon Web Services, Distributed Deep Learning, retrieved 2019-01-07
  12. ^ a b Sugandha Lahoti (2018-09-01). "Anima Anandkumar, the machine learning guru behind AWS bids adieu to AWS". Packt Hub. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  13. ^ Courtney (2018-07-06). "Dr. Anima Anandkumar has Joined the MLconf Board of Advisors!". The Machine Learning Conference. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  14. ^ "Anima Anandkumar | Research". research.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  15. ^ "Caltech Celebrates Newest Cohort of Named Professors | Caltech". The California Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 2019-01-09. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
  16. ^ NVIDIA, Research at NVIDIA: New Core AI and Machine Learning Lab, retrieved 2019-01-07
  17. ^ Daily-AI (2018-11-30). "NVIDIA Opening Core AI and ML Research Lab in Santa Clara". Daily AI. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  18. ^ "Dr. Anima Anandkumar". World Government Summit - Speakers. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  19. ^ "Home". TEDxIndianaUniversity. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  20. ^ "'From Ashes We Rise' TEDxIU talk to feature six speakers". Indiana Daily Student. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  21. ^ a b Ghosh, Shubhangi (2018-01-18). "Shaastra Spotlight Interviews: Anima Anandkumar". The Fifth Estate. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  22. ^ "More girl students to get admission in IITs from 2018". The Economic Times. 2017-04-15. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  23. ^ Simonite, Tom (2018-08-17). "AI Is the Future—But Where Are the Women?". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  24. ^ Simonite, Tom (2018-10-26). "AI Researchers Fight Over Four Letters: NIPS". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  25. ^ Roose, Kevin (2018-12-21). "The 2018 Good Tech Awards". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
  26. ^ Soper, Taylor (16 December 2020). "Retired UW computer science professor embroiled in Twitter spat over AI ethics and 'cancel culture'". GeekWire. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
  27. ^ "Archive of Twitter comments, now deleted". Archived from the original on 2020-12-14.
  28. ^ "My heartfelt apology". Retrieved 2020-12-16.
  29. ^ "Anima Anandkumar | Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing". simons.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  30. ^ "Caltech Computing + Mathematical Sciences | News | Anima Anandkumar Elevated to IEEE Fellow".
  31. ^ "NVIDIA Leaders Honored at VentureBeat Transform 'Women in AI Awards'". 17 July 2020.
  32. ^ "Google Research Awards: Fall 2015". Google AI Blog. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  33. ^ "Anandkumar receives AFOSR Young Investigator Award | Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems". Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  34. ^ Anandkumar, Anima. "Office Hour with Anima Anandkumar (UC Irvine): Big data conference: Strata + Hadoop World, March 13 - 16, 2017, San Jose, CA". conferences.oreilly.com. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  35. ^ "Anandkumar Receives 'Early-Career' Sloan Research Fellowship | Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems". Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  36. ^ "Microsoft Research Names Anima Anandkumar a Faculty Fellow | The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine". engineering.uci.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  37. ^ "Honors and Awards". acsp.ece.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
  38. ^ Anandkumar, Animashree; Tong, Lang (October 2007). "Type-Based Random Access for Distributed Detection Over Multiaccess Fading Channels". IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 55 (10): 5032–5043. Bibcode:2007ITSP...55.5032A. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.71.1653. doi:10.1109/tsp.2007.896302. ISSN 1053-587X. S2CID 10708719.
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