I want to wholeheartedly apologize to everyone hurt by my words. I want to assure you that I bear no animosity. I want to be part of an inclusive community where all voices are heard. 

I am sorry if my actions/words have ever created a threatening environment. My intention was only to change hearts and minds, and to raise awareness to the struggles that women and minorities face both online and in the real world. I will find better ways to achieve that goal. 

I am by no means perfect. I am here to learn from you. I am here to address your concerns. I hope you will join me in my quest to create a healthy and thriving community.

Many of you are very concerned about why my Twitter account is no longer active. I have voluntarily decided to de-activate my account in the interest of my safety and to reduce anxiety for my loved ones. I want to focus on my research and my team where my attention and energy are badly needed.

I want to emphasize that this decision is solely mine. My employers NVIDIA and Caltech are fully supportive of me and my mission. They support employees expressing diverse personal views.

I am proud of the work we have done to promote diversity and inclusion. I encourage you to continue doing that. We are all bright creative minds with an endless potential to innovate. We will find new and safer ways to stay connected and build a better future. 

These are unprecedented times. So far, I have managed to avoid watching movies that involved pandemics or germs; paranoia and panic was not a source of entertainment for me. But now we see one play out in real life at a global scale. This affects us all. There is no escape. Maya Angelou said it best:

“Love Is like A Virus. It Can Happen To Anybody At Any Time.” Maya Angelou.

I have been in self isolation for more than a week, here in California. But I haven’t really been alone. My days have been busy with many meetings with collaborators and students. We are all worried, especially about our families. But we also want to focus on how we can help  fight this. We are working on a number of projects that will help build better foundations for AI and lead to better accountability and rigor.

It has not been easy over the last few years. While deep learning has shown good promise, the amount of hype around it has been staggering. It has been hard to push back against this, but I have no regrets that I spoke up. Most recently, I spoke out on how half-baked AI apps are being used in sensitive contexts such as law enforcement with no oversight or accountability.

So how is this related to Covid? I read an excellent article titled “You cannot gaslight a virus.”  Gaslighting is a gendered term, used to describe toxic and abusive behavior directed against women that leads her to question her own sanity. Every woman I know has experienced it to some degree. The last few years have seen an unprecedented rise in populism, misinformation, and pushback against rigor and expertise. We see it in politics, and I have lived it in the AI field. This will now all have to change. I read a honest article by the founder of Starsky robotics on why we won’t be having self-driving trucks on road anytime soon “..supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. It isn’t actual artificial intelligence..” I agree with this. No longer can we rely on empty promises and hype. We have to deliver, we have to demonstrate, we have to carefully experiment, we have to test and repeat. This is a good thing.

The last few years have been challenging for women and minorities. I have faced struggles when I spoke up against sexual harassment and #meToo in AI. I have publicly named some of my harassers and fought to ensure that they cannot claim more victims. This has taken a huge toll. I have made enemies, some who are senior and powerful. I have had anonymous threats made against me. Many men (they are almost always men) have brushed aside our concerns, our pains, our struggles.

There is a severe lack of empathy. I see this now play out now amidst the Covid pandemic. At a time, when there is a need for unity and for scientifically grounded planning, our so-called President #notmypresident talks about the “Chinese virus” that puts my Asian friends and students at the risk of racist attacks. I see trolls attack the brave woman who shared her experiences in the ICU. It is well documented that trolls disproportionately target women but this is a new low to target someone who is fighting in the ICU and urging others to be careful.

It was no surprise to me to see the infamous Steven Pinker propagate misinformation and downplay dangers of Covid. This was my response on Twitter:

My previous online interactions with Pinker have been documented here. I lamented the severe lack of empathy and the tone-deaf nature of his views on rape and sexual harassment. I see the same lack of empathy when it comes to putting people at risk by spreading misinformation about Covid. For too long, we have celebrated narcissists in this culture without asking for any accountability and blindly following the path they prescribe. Not any more!

Let us hope that we usher in a new era as we unite together to fight this virus. We need new leaders with empathy and emotional intelligence. We need to spread love and hope. Stay safe, stay healthy and practice social distancing. I wish you all the best!

1. Got a faculty position at UC Irvine during the recession. Attended N(eur)IPS conference for the first time.
2. Discovered the power of tensors for machine learning and it became my core research focus.
3. Received many awards such as Sloan fellowship, Microsoft faculty fellowship and NSF Career Award.
4. Moved to AWS as principal scientist to build some of the first cloud AI applications. Got to deploy tensor algorithms in production.  
5. Became the youngest named chair professor at Caltech, the highest honor bestowed on individual faculty.
6. Started the ML research group at NVIDIA while continuing my work at Caltech.
7. Founded AI4science with Yisong Yue to accelerate interdisciplinary AI research at Caltech.
8. Shared my #meToo experiences and pushed for NeurIPS name change to help improve the climate for women and minorities in AI. 
9. Having grandkids: academically speaking. Many of my students and mentees became faculty members and formed thriving research groups.
10. Continue to learn and grow. Lucky to have had amazing opportunities and experiences.

2019 was an interesting year in so many ways. I was able to build and solidify research programs, both at NVIDIA and at Caltech. I was able to continue working towards diversity and inclusion in AI, and saw a lot of visible improvements (recent incident I wrote in my previous blog post is a notable exception).  Overall, there is a lot of positivity and a great way to end an eventful decade!

Before I list research highlights that I was personally involved in, here’s an overall summary for the AI field from my viewpoint. This was published on KDnuggets.

In 2019, researchers aimed to develop a better understanding of deep learning, its generalization properties, and its failure cases. Reducing dependence on labeled data was a key focus, and methods like self-training gained ground. Simulations became more relevant for AI training and more realistic in visual domains such as autonomous driving and robot learning, including on NVIDIA platforms such as DriveSIM and Isaac. Language models went big, e.g. NVIDIA’s 8 billion Megatron model trained on 512 GPUs, and started producing coherent paragraphs. However, researchers showed spurious correlations and undesirable societal biases in these models. AI regulation went mainstream with many prominent politicians voicing their support for ban of face recognition by Governmental agencies. AI conferences started enforcing a code of conduct and increased their efforts to improve diversity and inclusion, starting with the NeurIPS name change last year. In the coming year, I predict that there will be new algorithmic developments and not just superficial application of deep learning. This will especially impact “AI for science” in many areas such as physics, chemistry, material sciences and biology.

New book on Spectral Learning on Matrices on Tensors

Builds up spectral methods from first principles. Applications to learning latent variable models and deep neural networks. Order your copy here.

Better Optimization Methods

Fixing training in GANs through competitive gradient descent

(Excellent blog post by Florian here). In contrast to standard simultaneous gradient updates, CGD guarantees convergence and is efficient. NeurIPS poster below:

Application of CGD to GAN training and demonstrating its implicit competitive regularization (NeurIPS workshop):

Guaranteed convergence for SignSGD

SignSGD compresses gradient to a single bit but has no significant loss in accuracy in  practice. Theoretically, there are convergence guarantees. Paper. Main theorem:

Generative Models

Exciting collaboration between ML and neuroscience with Doris Tsao at Caltech. Adding feedback generative model to convolutional neural networks significantly improves robustness in tasks such as unsupervised denoising. Short paper here.

Robust Learning in Control Systems

Neural Lander

First work to successfully demonstrate use of deep learning to land drones with stability guarantees. Collaboration under CAST at Caltech. Paper at ICRA 2019.

Robust regression for safe exploration

We address the following: How to extrapolate robustly from your training data in real world control tasks and achieve end to end stability guarantees in safe exploration? Paper.

Multi-modal learning for UAV navigation

Multi-modal fusion of vision and IMU improves robustness in navigation and landing. Paper. 

Generalization in ML

Detecting hard examples through an angular measure

Watch my GTC-DC talk. Angular alignment is a robust measure for hardness: easier examples align more with the target class. We found that correspondence between angular measure and human selection frequency was statistically significant. Improves self training in domain adaptation. Paper.

Regularized learning for domain adaptation

New domain adaptation algorithm to correct for label shifts. Paper

Our ability to fix bias in deep-learning algorithms

Twitter thread here

Neural Programming

Recursive neural networks with external memory

Recursive networks have compositionality and can extrapolate to unseen instances.

Extrapolation to harder instances (higher tree depth) is challenging.

We show that augmenting with external memory stacks significantly improves extrapolation. Paper

Open Vocabulary Learning on Source Code with a Graph–Structured Cache

Use of syntax trees in program code to handle unbounded vocabulary.  Paper

Reinforcement Learning and Bandits

Robust off-policy evaluation

Robust methods to handle covariate shift in off-policy evaluation. PaperStochastic Linear Bandits with Hidden Low Rank Structure

Low regret algorithms for discovering hidden low rank structures in bandits. Paper

Competitive Differentiation for Lagrangian Problems

Many RL problems have constraints leading to Lagrangian formulation.  Paper

Context-based Meta RL with Structured Latent Space

AI4science and Other Applications

Neural ODEs for Turbulence Forecasting

Turbulence modeling is a notoriously hard problem. Exciting initial results presented at NeurIPS workshop.

Tackling Trolling through Dynamic Keyword Selection Methods

Can we find social media trolls and create more trustworthy environment online? We presented our ongoing study of the #meToo movement, in collaboration with Michael Alvarez from Social sciences at Caltech.

Can a name change provide a quantum leap in diversity and inclusion?

I didn’t expect to be writing this blog post. I had hoped for an internet-free week of vacation with my family in India. I had hoped to disconnect and rejuvenate. I had hoped to write a year-end message with positive changes I saw this year (which I still plan to do). Alas! My plan to quickly browse Facebook turned into a Twitter+Reddit storm and renewed  trolling that I had seen during last Christmas (more on that later). So here I am up at 5AM writing this post so that my vacation plans remain intact.

Scott Aaronson’s blog has become hugely popular over the years. I started reading them as a graduate student and quickly became a fan! When I started blogging, I aspired to mirror the clarity and accessibility that he brought to a complex scientific field. So thank you, Scott, for providing the public with this valuable resource!

The saga started a few weeks ago when I saw Scott Aaronson’s blog post on quantum supremacy.  I commented on Scott’s Facebook feed, having been his Facebook friend for many years. I didn’t take any stance on renaming of quantum supremacy. Instead, I focused on my experiences with renaming of NIPS: Neural Information Processing to NeurIPS last year. I shared many resources: here and here.

I saw many parallels and hoped that the resources would guide Scott and others towards enlightenment, and that would be the end of the story. Sadly, what followed was a big “punch in the stomach”, and that too has parallels with my experiences around the NeurIPS name change movement.

But before that, some background. I learnt that the term “Quantum supremacy” was first coined by John Preskill, my wonderful colleague at Caltech. Coincidentally, even NIPS was started at Caltech by Yaser Mostafa and Ed Posner in 1987. Read about its wonderful backstory involving Richard Feynman, John Hopfield and Carver Mead. I have deep admiration for these trailblazers at Caltech, and they inspire me every day to innovate and do pathbreaking research.

When I first heard the term “quantum supremacy”, my brain quickly associated it with “white supremacy”. This is natural since this is the most common use of the term. To demonstrate that I am not alone in this, I did a quick Google news search. I went on incognito mode, so as to remove my personalized recommendations. I used VPN to connect to the  California region since that would be my default location. Here’s what came up:

I got to know from Scott’s blog post that Leonie Mueck had first written about the problematic nature of the term. I had to Google to find the article.  Scott didn’t bother to link to the article, a common courtesy even when you disagree with its contents, as I am doing here. (This seemingly minor slight became a consistent issue of not giving credit to women as I personally experienced. More on that later.) Updated with a better link to discussion on quantum supremacy discussion, thanks to a young researcher, which Scott failed to provide on his blog.

Following my Facebook comments, Scott wrote a weak response to the effect “NIPS became a problem only because of juvenile Tshirts and quantum field does not have this problem”. He forgot one important word though: “yet”. In any case, I did not want to get entangled (pun intended) in another name-change issue. I hoped that he would read the articles I sent and would see how name change can bring about many positive changes for women and minorities.

Instead, in the middle of my vacation, I see a guest post on Scott’s blog by the notorious Steven Pinker!!!  Pinker blabbers on how NeurIPS name change was a severe misstep and blames it for the public not believing in climate change! I won’t bother to disentangle this hot mess. Feel free to read it at your own risk. This same Pinker had attempted to get me banned from Twitter at the height of NeurIPS name change, because I disagreed with him. He had directed his followers to extensively troll me. I even received gun threats and was worried for my personal safety.

Back to Scott’s blog, conspicuously missing in the post was any attribution to me for bringing up the NeurIPS name-change issue to his attention in the first place. I proceeded to comment on his Facebook post. Scott came up with: “I don’t mention people who are not public figures!” I found this terribly demeaning. My blog, my Twitter feed, extensive news articles revealed by a simple Google search would prove otherwise. But sadly Scott did not bother to do any of that or offer to update his blog after I raised this issue.

In my comments, I also brought up his amazingly accomplished wife Dana Moshkovitz. We share a bond: we were both victims of sexual harassment by Yuval Peres. (See Lior’s brave blog on this here). I have deeply admired her bravery for talking about her experiences more than a decade ago. Back then, it was a severe taboo and #meToo had not happened yet. Dana had reported Yuval to Microsoft HR and sadly saw no justice.  I asked Scott to discuss the NeurIPS name change with Dana, since I was sure that she would provide a different perspective. (Dana has written a detailed gracious email to me. I will be reaching out to her and asking her on what aspects, if any, could be made public).

Following my comment, to my dismay, Scott proceeds to unfriend me on Facebook. His justification: we were never friends in the first place! He also does not approve my follow-up comments on his blog for more than a day. Instead, he comments extensively disparaging me on his own post. It does not deserve to be repeated here. I allude to some of them on my Twitter thread where there is a thriving discussion.  A majority of responses on Twitter have been overwhelmingly supportive and it reinforces my belief that I am on the right side of history.

Sexist behavior from @sapinker continues. #protestNIPS was a catalyst in positive change at #neurips This year @celestekidd got a standing ovation after sharing her #MeToo experience and guiding the men to be allies. Amazing change from TITS parties and misogynistic rappers https://t.co/qz2YBlM8gY

— Anima Anandkumar (hiring at #NeurIPS2019) (@AnimaAnandkumar) December 25, 2019

Here are the parallels I see between name change of NIPS and quantum supremacy:

• Initially, I myself didn’t think NIPS was a big deal. I started attending when it was a small intimate affairs: we discussed posters until midnight, skied during workshops and attended the famous “Gatsby” party on the last day.  People like myself who are  entrenched in the field are the wrong people to make decisions on the name change. I changed my mind after I learned that young women had a problem and did not feel comfortable attending an event with this name. So it is natural that Scott does not see an issue with the term “quantum supremacy”.
• NIPS especially became a problematic word as AI expanded and saw a huge influx of “techbros” into the event. Scott’s defense is that this is not an issue with the quantum field.  But this will soon change. There is now immense public interest and news articles on quantum supremacy appear almost daily, especially following the recent Google announcement. Changing the name pre-emptively before the community explodes prevents harassment of minorities, and sends a strong message of commitment on inclusion and creation of welcoming environment to everyone.
• A Google search is a good indicator for assessing our internal biases and our perception of different words. I used this technique when I started my #protestNIPS petition. It doesn’t matter what kind of linguistic expertise Pinker has (which is debatable), what matters is the common perception of the term. A screenshot of the Google image search I did for the petition. As Scott points out, his candy does show up in the search. Male nipples also show up. But what about the majority?  Similarly, my search on Google news that I posted earlier on “supremacy” refers mostly to white supremacy. 
• Women and minorities experience undue emotional burden in our science and tech communities, especially in computer science where the number of women is miniscule. Name change has no negative impact on the privileged class, and only positive impact on the marginalized classes. So why not just do it? Scott’s attempts to silence me and other women sends a negative message that their opinions do not matter and that they are not welcome here.
• If name change is a minor frivolous matter, why are intellectual men like Aaronson and Pinker so vehement on opposing it? Pinker’s reasoning that name change has made us a laughing stock is sheer lunacy! Who is laughing at us? The joke is on them.

Here are all the positive changes that came about following the name change.

• A code of conduct has been established for all participants, and especially, for corporate sponsors.  The infamous corporate parties of 2017 and before, with misogynistic rappers, sexualized dancers with a stripper vibe, TITS parties, and Elon Musk making juvenile jokes about “nips and tits” are thankfully a thing in the past. Never again! Read about them here. 
• Celeste Kidd got a standing ovation at the opening session of NeurIPS 2019. She gave an excellent talk on belief formulation and idea validation. True to her trailblazing nature, she ended the talk with a discussion on the #meToo movement and the role of men. See here. She has been a brave advocate and was amongst the Silence Breakers who were namedTime Person of the Year in 2017. Such a reception would be inconceivable a few years ago.
• Diversity and inclusion chairs are now a part of organizing committee of every major AI conference. (Proud to be D&I chair for ICLR 2020 which will be the first international AI conference to be held in the African continent in Ethiopia).
• Diversity and inclusion has expanded vastly to other groups such as Black in AI, Latinx in  AI, and Queer in AI. The joint poster session for the affinity groups this year at NeurIPS was a highlight and was well attended by everyone, beyond the group members. (As an NVIDIAN, I was proud to see that NVIDIA sponsored all four groups and invited their members to our networking lunch. Slides from the lunch here).
• NeurIPS socials were organized for the first time by volunteers. In contrast to toxic corporate events I mentioned earlier, this was a sea of positivity. I attended “BUDS” where I helped mentor budding researchers. Being among young people with so much passion continues to inspire me. They also gave me a nice personalized gift.

I am the first to concede that it is hard to establish a causal link since controlled experiments were not carried out (wink).  But based on thousands of responses I have received (both written and oral), #protestNIPS name change has been a major catalyst in improving the climate to women and minorities in AI. This is beyond dispute.

Last year, a similar attempt to ruin my holidays was carried out by another famous bully, when I asked him to be a better leader and moderate his feed that included the n-word and jokes on making sex tapes. You can read about this on blog post by the brave Layla El Asri here.  I have a theory on the neuro-sis (!) of these powerful men of science spreading toxicity during the holiday season. “An empty mind is a devil’s workshop” and free time during holidays brings out the worst in them.  These men have a constant need for attention and deep insecurities. I hope they focus on their own wellness and explore yoga/meditation and other mechanisms to connect with their inner selves. This will make world a far better place.

Scott’s role as an unofficial spokesperson for an entire scientific discipline comes with great responsibility. I am sad to say that he has failed miserably at this with the recent events.  I hope he learns from this and becomes an ally. His daughter would greatly benefit (I know this since he brought her up in his blog post as a defensive shield).

Finally, I want to comment on the previous title I chose for the post. I used the term “neo Nazis” since that is closely associated white supremacy. But by no means am I equating the violence perpetrated by neo Nazis with the debate around quantum supremacy. But I want to be inclusive and I am open to feedback. When a group of people felt uncomfortable with it, I decided to discard it. Unlike Pinker and Aaronson, I am open to changing names and titles if that helps create a better environment ! Let us hope we can all find common ground.

Happy holidays everyone! Here’s hoping to a better 2020.

The Thanksgiving weekend has been a much needed staycation. Given how much I travel rest of the year, I feel lucky to avoid all the weather-related chaos this weekend. I got to even see the rare views of snow-capped mountains juxtaposed with palm trees as I worked from my office at Caltech.

I got the time to reflect on so many things that I am thankful for. I am lucky to be part of two amazing communities at Caltech and NVIDIA. This year I have deepened my professional relationships at both the places and also made many friends and found wonderful supportive mentors. I am thankful for amazing colleagues from whom I have learnt so much. I have amazing team of researchers at both the places. Their curiosity and passion continues to inspire me.

I am thankful for all the support and encouragement that I have received when I have spoken about the need for better diversity and inclusion in our tech communities. Having allies and raising awareness has been incredibly fulfilling. I am especially thankful to also those who had the humility and honesty to tell me that they were wrong or unaware and that I had changed their mind. I hope you can pass it along. Together we can build a healthy community where everyone can thrive.

I am so thankful to my family. They are my rock and have been so supportive through everything I went through this year. I am thankful to having a new addition to my family:  my sister-in-law Prashanthi who displays wisdom and maturity beyond her years.

I should add that it hasn’t always been easy for me to show appreciation and communicate how much I am thankful to everyone. I  strive to make things better in all walks of my life, both personal and professional. This means my mind is attuned to finding gaps, calling them out, and trying to fix things. I believe that it is possible to strike a balance: being thankful for the present while striving for a better tomorrow.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

The views expressed here are solely my own and do not in any way reflect those of my employers.

This blog post is meant to clarify my position on the recent OpenAI controversy. A few days ago, I engaged with Jack Clark, who manages communications and policy for OpenAI, on Twitter. It is hard to have a nuanced discussion on Twitter and I am writing this blog post to better summarize my thoughts. For a longer and more thorough discussion on this topic, see excellent blog posts by Rob Munro and Zack Lipton.

The controversy: OpenAI released their language model a few days ago with a huge media blitz

My Twitter comments:

When OpenAI was started a few years with much fanfare, its core mission was to foster openness in AI. As a non-profit, it was meant to freely collaborate with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.  I find this goal highly admirable and important.

I also have a deep admiration for Jack Clark. His newsletter has been a great resource for the community to keep up with the latest updates in machine learning. In the past, he has pushed for more openness from the ML community. When the NeurIPS conference banned journalists from attending the workshops, he protested on Twitter and I supported his stance.

On the other hand, OpenAI seems to be making a conscious effort to move away from this open model and from its core founding principles. A few months ago, Jack Clark wrote this on Twitter:

So why do I feel so strongly about this? Because I think that OpenAI is using its clout to make ML research more closed and inaccessible. I have always been a strong proponent for open source and for increasing reproducibility and accountability in our ML community. I am pushing to make it compulsory in our machine-learning conferences. See my recent blog post on this topic.

I am certainly not dismissive of AI risks. It is important to have a conversation about it and it is important to involve experts working on this topic. But for several reasons, I believe that OpenAI is squandering an opportunity to have a real conversation and distorting the views to the public. Some of the reasons are:

• OpenAI is severely playing up the risks of releasing a language model. This is an active area of research with numerous groups working on very similar ideas. Even if OpenAI kept the whole thing locked up in a vault, another team would certainly release a similar model.
• In this whole equation, it is academia that loses out the most. I have previously spoken about the severe disadvantage that academic researchers face due to lack of reproducibility and open source code. They do not have the luxury of a large amount of compute and engineering resources for replication.
•  This kind of fear-mongering about AI risks distorts science to the public. OpenAI followed a planned media strategy to provide limited access to their model to a few journalists and fed them with a story about AI risks without any concrete proofs. This is not science and does not serve humanity well.

A better approach would be to:

• Go back to the founding mission and foster openness and collaboration. Engage with researchers, especially academic researchers; collaborate with them, provide them the resources and engage in the peer-review process. This is the time-tested way to advance science.
• Engage with experts on risk management to study the impacts of AI. Engage with economists to study the right incentive mechanisms to design for deployment of AI. Publish those studies in peer-reviewed venues.

Numerous other scientists have expressed a similar opinion. I hope OpenAI takes this feedback and acts on it.