Two Caltech Professors Honored with IEEE Technical Field Awards

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Steven H. Low, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, have been selected to receive 2025 IEEE Technical Field Awards. Anandkumar will be honored with the 2025 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for outstanding early- to mid-career contributions to technologies holding the promise of innovative applications. Low will receive the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, which is awarded for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications.

The citation from the IEEE says Anandkumar is being honored "[f]or contributions to AI, including tensor methods and neural operators with applications to scientific domains." Anandkumar is a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research and has helped develop unifying theoretical frameworks for machine learning algorithms, especially techniques called tensor methods and neural operators that revolve around partial differential equations, which Anandkumar calls "the workhorses of science and math." Collaborating with colleagues, she has also found ways to apply AI to a broad range of scientific problems—from modeling aerosolized particles of the virus that causes COVID-19 to designing faster cars, and from determining smoother ways of landing drones to improving methods of drug design.

"I'm really honored, and I didn't have any expectation of receiving this award because it's a very broad award covering many different fields," says Anandkumar. "Also, when I look at the previous recipients, I hold them in such high regard. It is truly an honor to be part of this group."

Anandkumar, who is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, received her bachelor's degree from the Indian Institutes of Technology in 2004 and her doctoral degree from Cornell University in 2009. She completed postdoctoral research at MIT and an assistant professorship at the UC Irvine before coming to Caltech as a visiting associate in 2017. She was named Bren Professor at Caltech that same year.

Anandkumar is a fellow of IEEE and the Association of Computing Machinery. She has received several honors, including an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, a Schmidt AI2050 Senior Fellowship, and faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She is also part of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network and previously served as senior director of AI research at NVIDIA and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services.

Steven H. Low is being honored by IEEE with the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award "[f]or contributions to the theoretical foundation and practical implementation of Internet congestion control." Low's research focuses on cyber-physical systems, networking, and smart grid. Low is perhaps best known for the development of a mathematical theory of internet congestion control and the design and deployment of a congestion control algorithm known as FAST TCP for high-speed data transfer over long distances. That protocol has been accelerating more than 1 terabyte of internet traffic every second since 2014.

"I was surprised to receive the news. It is a nice recognition of the exciting work of the first-generation Netlab and our collaborators," says Low. Since about 2010, Low's lab, which he calls the Netlab, has focused on solving optimal power flow problems for smart grid applications.

Low earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1987 and his doctoral degree from UC Berkeley in 1992. Before joining the Caltech faculty as an associate professor in 2000, Low was at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey and the University of Melbourne in Australia. He was named a full professor in 2006 and the Gilloon Professor in 2018.

Low is a fellow of IEEE, the Association of Computing Machinery, and the Chinese Society for Electrical Engineering. He has won the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award and the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award.