Tamara (Tammy) G. Kolda

Developer of the MATLAB Tensor Toolbox, Kolda has served as a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in the Informatics and Systems Assessments department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. Her research interests have included 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, she held the Householder Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scientific Computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kolda received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1997.

She received several awards, most notably a 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Kolda has been a keynote speaker at several workshops and conferences, including the 2010 SIAM Annual Meeting and the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'07). In multilinear algebra and tensor decompositions, she is best known for her work on the MATLAB Tensor Toolbox and 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, Kolda was recognized with a Sandia Award for Excellence for Laboratory Directed Research & Development for work related to tensor decompositions. In 2010, she co-organized the AIM Workshop on Computational Optimization for Tensor Decompositions, served on the steering committee of the Conference on Tensor Decompositions and Applications, and co-organized the NIPS Workshop on Tensors, Kernels, and Machine Learning.

In past work, she oversaw the development of HOPSPACK, a serial, multithreaded, or parallel, derivative-free optimization software framework for efficiently solving nonlinear optimization problems; this software extended and succeeded her well-known APPSPACK software package. Additionally, Kolda has contributed to the Trilinos Project, a suite of numerical software packages and winner of a 2004 R&D 100 award, and has served as co-lead on the NOX nonlinear solver C++ software package, which is part of Trilinos. She also worked in the area of graph partitioning, considering the problem of partitioning matrices for parallel computing. Her 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.

Kolda has served as Section Editor for the Software and High Performance Computing section of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis. She has served on various program committees (ASONAM10, SDM10, LDMTA09, IPDPS09, SDM08, SDM06, SC02) and co-chaired the 2008 SIAM Annual Meeting. She served as Chair, Vice Chair, and Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering from 2009–2010, 2007–2008, and 2004–2006, respectively, and as Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra from 2001–2003. Kolda also edited NA Digest from 2005–2010, served as a member of the human resources board for the American Institute of Mathematics, and served as Web Editor for the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1997–2002. She has also been a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).