Anima is Bren Professor at Caltech and Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA. She received her B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She did her postdoctoral research at MIT and an assistant professorship at the University of California Irvine. She has received several honors such as the IEEE fellowship, Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Faculty Fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network.
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. 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. She was made an assistant professor with tenure at UC Irvine in 2016. She specialised in large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics. Anandkumar was a Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services from 2016 to 2018. She worked with the Apache MXNet tool, introducing new functionality and developing multi-modal processing algorithms. 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. 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. Anandkumar joined the Machine Learning Conference Board of Advisors in 2018. In 2018 Anandkumar joined NVIDIA as Director of Machine Learning Research, and Caltech as the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. At NVIDIA she opened a new core laboratories in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Santa Clara. She has pushed for governments to invest in robotics and artificial intelligence. She spoke at the 2018 TEDxIndiana University about the algorithms she has developed to process big data.