Anima Anandkumar Highlights AI’s Potential to Solve ‘Hard Scientific Challenges’

Anima Anandkumar is using AI to help solve the world’s challenges faster. She has used the technology to speed up prediction models in an effort to get ahead of extreme weather, and to work on sustainable nuclear fusion simulations so as to one day safely harness the energy source.

Accepting a TIME100 AI Impact Award in Dubai on Monday, Anandkumar—a professor at California Institute of Technology who was previously the senior director of AI research at Nvidia—credited her engineer parents with setting an example for her. “Having a mom who is an engineer was just such a great role model right at home.” Her parents, who brought computerized manufacturing to her hometown in India, opened up her world, she said. 

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“Growing up as a young girl, I didn’t think of computer programs as something that merely resided within a computer, but [as something] that touched the physical world and produced these beautiful and precise metal parts,” said Anandkumar. “As I pursued AI research over the last two decades, this memory continued to inspire me to connect the physical and digital worlds together.”

Neural operators—a type of AI framework that can learn across multiple scales—are key to Anandkumar’s efforts. Using neural operators, Anandkumar and her collaborators are able to build systems “with universal physical understanding that can simulate any physical process, generate novel engineering designs that were previously out of reach, and make new scientific discoveries,” she said. 

Speaking about her work in 2022 with an interdisciplinary team from Nvidia, Caltech, and other academic institutions, she noted, “I am proud of our work in weather forecasting where, using neural operators, we built the first AI-based high-resolution weather model called FourCastNet.” This model is tens of thousands of times faster than traditional weather models and often more accurate than existing systems when predicting extreme events, such as heat waves and hurricanes, she said.

“Neural operators are helping us get closer to solving hard scientific challenges,” she said. After outlining some of the technology’s other possible uses, including designing better drones, rockets, sustainable nuclear reactors, and medical devices, Anandkumar added, “To me, this is just the beginning.”

The TIME100 AI Impact Awards Dubai was presented by the World Government Summit and the Museum of the Future.

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