About

AIMI is led by Soundar Kumara, a pioneer in applied AI and ML research. Dr. Kumara is the Allen, E., and Allen, M., Pearce Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State. He obtained his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering Degree from SVUCE Tirupati, M.Tech., from IIT Madras and Ph.D., in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, USA. He held visiting appointments with Univ. of Tokyo, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, City Univ. of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, and MIT.  His research interests are in sensor-based manufacturing process monitoring, data science, graph analytics and large-scale complex networks, and AI and ML with applications in manufacturing and healthcare.

Dr. Kumara has investigated the use of AI and ML in diverse fields and industries from ecommerce to manufacturing, and from medical to advanced technologies, such as the internet-of-things (IOT). He is among the first people to work in AI in manufacturing from the IE discipline.

Over his distinguished career, he has worked on projects funded by NSF, DARPA, ARO, and several industries totaling over $45 Million. He conducted applied modeling and implementations through research projects including for companies such as GM, GE, Ford-New Holland, CNH, and DaiNippon Screen (Kyoto). He has pioneered nonlinear real-time sensor data analysis techniques for manufacturing process monitoring and diagnosis and large-scale sensor networks. In recent times his work with Geisinger Health Systems has resulted in implementations which help intervention on high-risk patients after surgical discharge. 

Professor Kumara has nearly 300 publications to his credit and his work has been cited more than 14,000 times. One of his papers co-authored with Drs. Reka Albert and Nandini Raghavan in Physical Reviews-E is designated as a milestone paper for 2007 (25 papers were selected, one for each year published in PRE from 1993 till 2018 from among 50,000 publications). This work, resulted in the LPA based Clustering in Large Networks which is a part of many software packages (R, python, i-Graph, and Java).

A highly respected teacher and educator, Kumara has advised students who now work in some of the world’s biggest companies and most prestigious academic institutions. Sixty-four Ph.D. and seventy-six M.S. students graduated under his guidance. Kumara’s research expertise can be viewed on Google Scholar.

Gretta Kellogg is the assistant director for AIMI. She returns to ICDS and Penn State from Cornell University where she led as the Director founding Cornell’s new epigenomics core (EGC) facility. EGC processed over 2,100 High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS) samples serving collaborations with Cornell labs, New York City hospitals, and national cancer centers. She led the development of EGC open-source software, co-authored several publications, and helped co-author three funded grants during the two years of the pandemic and has brought that experience to AIMI.

Previously at Penn State, she supported faculty’s research computing initiatives as the ICDS Research Computing Facilitator (ACI-REF). To her ACI-REF role, she brought experience as a Program Manager, successfully leading two genomic centers at Penn State for almost a decade, leveraging high-performance computing solutions, assisting with obtaining grant funding, and managing multi-million-dollar budgets for complex research initiatives. She earned IT project management experience and credentials while supporting enterprise IT in ever-increasing technically skilled rolls. As a first-generation American, college student, and under-represented minority woman in computing, and parenting a child with a disability, she strongly promotes diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) opportunities for students and colleagues, having successfully mentored several dozen mentees.

Todd Price, the Corporate Relations Director for Research for the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), is best known for his executive leadership skills and information technology expertise. With over 15 years of experience in business development, data analytics, and information technology, he’s bringing innovation and reorganization to the workforce through high-performance computing research while working in artificial intelligence development. His knowledge and diverse experience have helped him provide promising results to the organizations he’s worked for over the years.