Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar

Professor Anandkumar's research interests are in the areas of large-scale machine learning, non-convex optimization and high-dimensional statistics. In particular, she has been spearheading the development and analysis of tensor algorithms for machine learning. Tensor decomposition methods are embarrassingly parallel and scalable to enormous datasets. They are guaranteed to converge to the global optimum and yield consistent estimates for many probabilistic models such as topic models, community models, and hidden Markov models. More generally, Professor Anandkumar has been investigating efficient techniques to speed up non-convex optimization such as escaping saddle points efficiently.