Anima Anandkumar - Artificial Intelligence and a flourishing society

Professor Anima Anandkumar is a meteor in the field of artificial intelligence or AI. Her rise in the space has been a phenomenon to behold, lighting it up both through her prophetic vision that it required a deeper understanding of the nature of intelligence itself and with the friction she created with some of the long-held biases and discrimination in that community. Her's is a refreshing and inviting voice that might just alter the trajectory of AI away from the existential threats and dystopias that surround it.

In the blink of an eye on career time scales, Anima has filled a resume that would be a Herculean task to summarize. Here's a short attempt.

Just 12 years removed from her PhD at Cornell, she is the youngest 'Named Chair', the highest honor the university bestows on individual faculty, at Caltech and is simultaneously the director of machine learning research at NVIDIA, one of the foremost AI and computation companies. She was a postdoctoral student at MIT, a researcher at Microsoft, assistant, then associate, professor at UC Irvine, and a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services. She leaves in her wake seminal research papers and operational tools that have changed the very foundation of AI and has helped redefine the field as one crossing both academia and industry.

But her brilliance is beyond scientific success - she is an outspoken activist for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access and regularly challenges existing biases and discrimination, which are pronounced in imbalanced fields like science and technology. She has done this in the face of opposition to change within the field of AI and is a courageous and shining voice of change.

Anima's awards are staggering - Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, Young Investigator Awards from the Army research office and Air Force office of sponsored research, and Women in AI by Venturebeat, to name a few.

She is a singular mind and I'm thankful to have had the opportunity to chat with her on Origins.