Keynote

Keynote Speaker

Anima Anandkumar is Bren Professor at Caltech and Co-Founder of Accelerated Understanding. She builds artificial intelligence that can simulate and understand the physical world to invent and discover. Her AI algorithms, including Neural Operators, a deep learning framework for learning multiscale physical phenomena, have enabled many scientific advances, such as extreme weather forecasting; plasma simulation in nuclear fusion; drug discovery; and design of medical devices, chips, and quantum dots.

Anima was named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time magazine in 2026. She also received the Time 100 Impact Award in 2025, recognizing global leaders who have gone above and beyond to move their industries and the world forward. She is a member of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board, has presented her work on AI+Science to the U.S. Presidential Science Council (PCAST), and at the TED main stage.

Anima is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI and has received the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award; the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 senior fellowship; fellowships from the Guggenheim, Alfred P. Sloan and Blavatnik Foundations; the NSF Career Award; the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras; and best paper award at Neural Information Processing. Her team received the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research at SC22 and were finalists in 2021.

Anima received her B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, her Ph.D. from Cornell University, and did her postdoctoral research at MIT. She was previously principal scientist at Amazon Web Services and senior director of AI research at NVIDIA.