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]
Anima Anandkumar has also developed AI algorithms that with applications in various scientific domains including weather forecasting, drug discovery, scientific simulations and engineering design. She invented Neural Operators that extend deep learning to modeling multi-scale processes in these scientific domains and learn in function spaces and are orders of magnitude faster than traditional simulations. She has developed AI-based high-resolution weather models,[21] an AI-aided method for designing anti-infection medical catheters.[22] Neural operators were featured as a highlight for 2021 in Math and Computer Science by the Quanta Magazine,[23] and genome-scale foundation models with emergent behavior in predicting evolutionary dynamics and protein function in several diverse tasks and scenarios,[24] which won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research in 2022.[25]
Anandkumar has also done some of the early work on generalist AI agents using language models, which are capable of life-long learning using foundation models in an interactive manner. In particular, her work has shown how interactive in-context learning in language models can be used to construct actions in form of program code to solve complex open-ended tasks in environments such as Minecraft[26] and robotic reinforcement learning.[27]
While at Caltech, Anandkumar co-founded the AI for Science initiative in 2018. In 2023, she was invited by the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on AI+Science.[28] In addition, she has given keynotes at the Annual Meeting of the US National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics,[29] the UCLA distinguished seminar,[30] the SIAM annual meeting,[31] and the Nature Reviews Physics, hosted by the Alan Turing Institute.[32]
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.[33] The petition calls for campus-wide systems to monitor sexual harassment, improved campus security and increased engagement with alumni.[33][34] 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.[35] She was one of several campaigners to rename the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 'NIPS' as NeurIPS.[36] In 2018, she was awarded a New York Times Good Tech Award.[37]
Controversies
In December 2020, Anandkumar was embroiled in a Twitter controversy, when she published a list of individuals who allegedly followed, liked or supported any Tweets made by 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, or simply followed him on Twitter. She never clarified how she actually came up with that list.[38] She suggested that followers "try and change the mind of [these] fanboys of Pedro[...] Especially junior people".[39] Following prompt backlash from individuals concerned about the circulation of such a blacklist, Anandkumar deactivated her Twitter account temporarily 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".[40]
Awards and honors
Anandkumar has won several awards and honours, including:[41]
^Pathak, J., Subramanian, S., Harrington, P. B., Raja, S. S., Chattopadhyay, A., Mardani, M., Kurth, T., Hall, D., Li, Z., Azizzadenesheli, K., Hassanzadeh, P., Kashinath, K., Anandkumar, A. (22 February 2022). "FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators". PASC '23: Proceedings of the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference. abs/2202.11214. arXiv:2202.11214.
