10 things that happened last decade

  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.