2004/BT/EE Bren Professor, California Institute of Technology, Former Senior Director of AI Research, NVDIA
Prof. Anima Anandkumar is a highly accomplished individual who has made significant contribution to the field of artificial intelligence. Her AI algorithms have revolutionized scientific domains including weather forecasting, drug discovery, scientific simulations and engineering design. She developed the first AI-based high-resolution weather model that is tens of thousands of times faster than traditional forecasting systems and also accurate. Her AI method recently designed a better medical catheter with a hundred times reduction in bacterial contamination.
Prof. Anandkumar is currently a Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, USA. Until recently, she was a Senior Director of AI research at NVIDIA and previously, a Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services. Her academic background includes a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 followed by a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2009. She was a Post-doctoral Associate in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA, and an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Further, she is also the founder of AI4Science initiative, Caltech which is aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research. She recently presented her work on AI and Science to the White House Science Council, advising the President of USA.
Prof. Anandkumar is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM and AAAI. She has received several awards including the Guggenheim and Alfred P. Sloan fellowships, the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 senior fellow, 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.
For her achievements and contributions towards interdisciplinary scientific innovation, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and its alumni are proud to confer Prof. Anima Anandkumar with the Distinguished Alumni Award for the year 2024.
