Tamara G Kolda

Bio

Tamara (Tammy) Kolda is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Informatics and Decision Sciences department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. Her research interests include multilinear algebra and tensor decompositions, data and graph mining, optimization, nonlinear solvers, graph algorithms, cybersecurity, parallel computing and the design of scientific software. Before joining Sandia, Tammy held the Householder Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scientific Computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1997-1999. She received her Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1997. Tammy's honors include a 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the 2005 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland in College Park. She was a keynote speaker at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'07) and will be delivering invited addresses at several upcoming conferences including the ICDM'09 Workshop on Large-scale Data Mining: Theory and Applications (LDM-TA), BIT 50 - Trends in Numerical Computing, and SIAM's 2010 Annual Meeting.

In multilinear algebra and tensor decompositions, Tammy is a co-developer of the MATLAB Tensor Toolbox, has co-organized a series of tutorials on Mining Large Time-evolving Data Using Matrix and Tensor Tools, and recently published a SIAM Review article on tensor decompositions and applications. She co-authored a paper on memory-efficient Tucker (MET) tensor decompositions that resulted in the Best Paper Prize in the Theoretical/Algorithms Category at the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'08). In 2009, Tamara was recognized with a Sandia Award for Excellence for Laboratory Directed Research & Development for work related to tensor decompositions. Tamara is currently developing new optimization methods for computing tensor decompositions and applying tensor decompositions to data mining problems such as link prediction or computing factorizations in the presence of missing data. She is co-organizer of the upcoming AIM Workshop on Computational Optimization for Tensor Decompositions to be held in Spring 2010 and on the steering committee of the Conference on Tensor Decompositions and Applications to be held in Italy in Fall 2010.

In past work, Tammy led the development of HOPSPACK, a serial, multithreaded, or parallel, derivative-free optimization software framework for efficiently solving nonlinear optimization problems; this new software extends and succeeds her well-known APPSPACK software package. See her SIAM Review article on direct search methods for more information on derivative-free search, as well as follow-on papers on linear constraints and hybrid methods. Additionally, Tammy was a contributor to the Trilinos project, a suite of numerical software packages and winner of a 2004 R&D 100 award and co-lead on the NOX nonlinear solver C++ software package, which is part of Trilinos. Tammy has also worked in the area of graph partitioning, considering the problem of partitioning matrices for parallel computing. Tammy's thesis work considered the semi-discrete matrix decomposition (SDD) as applied to latent semantic indexing in text retrieval as well as variations on the well-known limited-memory BFGS methods in optimization.

Currently, Tammy is an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, chair for the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering, a member of the human resources board for the American Institute of Mathematics, and the editor of NA Digest. Previously, she has served on various program committees (ASONAM10, SDM10, LDMTA09, IPDPS09, SDM08, SDM06, SC02), was co-chair for the 2008 SIAM Annual Meeting, served as the Vice Chair and Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering from 2007-2008 and 2004-2006, respectively, and as Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra from 2001-2003, and as Web Editor for the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1997-2002. Tamara is also a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).