Influential Indian women are leading the way in artificial intelligence (AI) research.
In AI research and application, Indians have been at the forefront. India now has more graduate students studying in America than China did a year ago, according to an article in The Economist.
India accounts for 29% of the estimated 2.5 million immigrant STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers in the US. 8% of the world’s top researchers in AI are from India.
Nor are women falling behind. Indians, including our women, have the greatest rates of AI skill penetration as of 2022.
These women are on a list of the highest-achieving female AI professionals.
- Aakanksha Chowdhery
After graduating from IIT Delhi with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Aakanksha Chowdhery pursued a Ph.D. program at Stanford University. “Teaching and mentoring students has always made me feel great, but because of the nature of the academic career, things did not always go as planned,” the woman stated.
Before becoming an associate research scholar at Princeton University in 2017, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. “I got to build real things as part of my Microsoft research experience,” she stated in describing her experience.
She works as a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind at the moment. Her 51 published publications cover a wide range of research topics in signal processing, machine learning, edge computing, and mobile networked systems. Her work has benefited industry consortiums and standards, including the OpenFog Consortium and DSL standards.
The book PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways was written primarily by her. The ability of a massive AI model with 540 billion parameters—designed to comprehend and produce language—is demonstrated in this research.
- Niki Parmar
Transformers were created as a result of the groundbreaking research paper Attention Is All You Need, which Niki Parmar co-wrote. She started her career at the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Southern California as a research assistant after earning her master’s degree there. “I took the first MOOCs on ML and AI by Andrew Ng and Peter Norvig during my undergrad,” said Niki, expressing her first interest in machine learning.
Later on, she was employed by Google Brain and Research. “I had the chance to work on end-to-end deep learning systems here, where the goal was to develop new approaches to solving NLP problems,” stated Niki.
Her research journey has involved studying how self-attention and other inductive biases can be leveraged to better models across many tasks like machine translation, language modeling, and more recently perception. She has authored 28 papers.
Along with Ashish Vaswani, another author of the Attention Is All You Need article, she co-founded Adept AI in 2021. Since 2023, she has been actively working as the co-founder of Essential AI. The company has raised $56.5 million in funding, including support from major players in the IT industry like AMD, Google, and Nvidia.
- Anima Anandkumar
Mysore native Anima Anandkumar received her Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University after completing her master’s degree at IIT Madras. At the California Institute of Technology, she presently holds the Bren Professorship with an emphasis on machine learning.
Anandkumar was formerly the director of NVIDIA’s machine learning research division, where she oversaw research on deep learning, tensor algebraic techniques, and non-convex optimization issues. Her high research output is demonstrated by her h-index of 74.
Numerous honors, including the ACM Grace Hopper Award and the IEEE Fellow Award, have been given to her for her efforts. Her research contributions encompass a wide range of topics, such as machine learning with uncertainty and dependencies, non-convex optimization, and tensor techniques.
- Suchi Saria
Suchi Saria graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in electrical engineering with a concentration in statistics.
Currently, Saria serves as CEO of Bayesian Health, founding research director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, and director of the Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab. Working across departments at Johns Hopkins, including computer science, statistics, medicine, and health policy, is part of this role. Her business wants to advance healthcare technology using machine learning.
She has received numerous honors for her work, one of which is the designation of Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in addition to being listed as one of the “35 Innovators Under 35” by the MIT Technology Review.
Her Google Scholar profile boasts an astounding 109 papers related to healthcare, machine learning, and their convergence. She has created tools for clinical decision-making, models for individualized care, and algorithms for forecasting illnesses like sepsis and cardiac arrest. In addition, she manages uncertainty in medical data and concludes causal inference, particularly about chronic conditions like scleroderma.
- Monisha Ghosh
Currently, Monisha Ghosh has adjunct research professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. She completed her electrical engineering bachelor’s degree at IIT Kharagpur in 1986 and her doctorate at the University of Southern California in 1991. In addition to her scholarly work, she participated in national telecommunications research and policy.
In June 2021, Ghosh’s employment as the FCC’s CTO came to an end. The establishment of regulations for the unlicensed 6 GHz bands, the standardization of broadband signal measurements, and the promotion of open RAN technology were among the key areas of focus for her work on national policy and technological standards for broadband wireless communications.
She oversaw wireless networking research and invented the use of machine learning in wireless networks while serving as a rotating program director at the NSF from 2017 to 2019. This was before her position at the FCC.
Ghosh has contributed significantly to research in addition to her work on policy, especially while she was a research professor at the University of Chicago. Her studies covered spectrum sharing, 5G cellular networks, next-generation Wi-Fi, and wireless technologies for the Internet of Things.
Ghosh worked in industrial research and development before being appointed to her academic positions. She held roles at Bell Laboratories, Interdigital, and Philips Research.
- Parvati Dev
Currently serving as CEO of SimTabs, a business that creates lifelike simulations for medical education, is Parvati Dev. However, after attending IIT Kharagpur for her undergraduate studies, she relocated to California to pursue her master’s and doctoral studies in technology and education at Stanford University.
With 94 publications to her credit, Parvati has made significant contributions to the fields of haptics, virtual patient simulations, 3D anatomy models, and surgical simulation. Her work at Stanford University established her as a pioneer in medical education technology, especially in the area of digitalizing the medical curriculum.
