Himabindu Lakkaraju
Contact
Information
Gates 448
Gates Computer Science Building
353 Serra Mall
Stanford - 94305
E-mail: himalv@cs.stanford.edu; himalv@stanford.edu
Phone: 650-422-9550
Research
Interests
Machine Learning Theory and Applications, Computational Social Science, Natural
Language Processing.
Education
• Stanford University
Sep 2012 - Present
PhD in Computer Science
Thesis: Interpretable Models for Analyzing and Complementing Human Decision Making
Grades: 3.88/4.0
Advisor: Prof. Jure Leskovec
Collaborators: Prof. Sendhil Mullainathan, Prof. Jon Kleinberg, Prof. Jens
Ludwig.
• Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
Aug 2008 - Jul 2010
Master of Engineering in Computer Science & Automation
Thesis: Exploring Topic Models for Understanding Sentiments Expressed in
Customer Reviews
Grades: 7.0/8.0
Advisor: Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya
Collaborators: Prof. Indrajit Bhattacharya, Dr. Srujana Merugu
Work Experience
• University of Chicago, Illinois, Chicago
Jun 2014 - Aug 2014
Data Science for Social Good Fellow
Mentor: Rayid Ghani
Early warning systems for predicting high school dropouts using machine
learning
• IBM Research - India, Bangalore, India
Jul 2010 - Jul 2012
Technical Staff Member
Mentor: Dr. Srujana Merugu
Automated extraction of useful insights from unstructured text data on the
web and analysis of social networks
• SAP Research, Bangalore, India
Jul 2009 - Mar 2010
Collaborator (Academic Research Alliance with IISc)
Unsupervised extraction of product facets from customer reviews using topic
models
• Adobe Systems Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India
Jul 2007 - Jul 2008
Software Engineer
Design and implementation of image to pdf export features and geometric
shape drawing algorithms for Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Fireworks
Honors and
Awards
• Google Anita Borg Scholarship Recipient, 2015
• Robert Bosch Stanford Graduate Fellow, 2013-16
• Facebook PhD Fellowship Finalist, 2013
• KDD Student Travel Award, 2014 & 2015
• Eminence and Excellence Award for outstanding contributions to research at IBM, IBM Research - India, 2012
• Research Division Award recognizing contributions to research at IBM,
IBM Research - India, 2012
• Best Paper Award, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM)
2011
• Graduate Scholarship, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), 2008-10
• Runners-up in International World Wide Web (WWW) Novel Web
Software Contest for the software “Web-based Image Recognizer”, 2010
• Honorable Mention at Yahoo HackU, Bangalore for the hack “Flickr
based Image Recognition”, 2010
• Masters Thesis proposal received research grants from SAP Research,
2009 (Only 5 project proposals selected from India)
• Masters Thesis awarded Highest Grade at Indian Institute of Science,
2010
• SPOT Award for outstanding contributions at Adobe Systems Pvt. Ltd.,
2008 (Youngest Employee of Adobe India to receive the same)
• All India Rank 32 (99.82%ile) in Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering
(GATE), entrance exam of the IISc & IITs, in Computer Science & Engineering, 2008 (out of 18,224 candidates)
• University Rank 10, Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science, Visveswaraiah Technological University, 2007 (out of 8000 students from 175 colleges)
Publications
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Stephen Bach, Jure Leskovec. Interpretable Decision
Sets: A Joint Framework for Description and Prediction. To appear in ACM
SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD), 2016
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Everaldo Aguiar, Carl Shan, David Miller, Nasir Bhanpuri, Rayid Ghani, Kecia Addison. A Machine Learning Framework to Identify Students at Risk of Adverse Academic Outcomes. ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp.
1909-1918, 2015
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan.
A Bayesian Framework for Modeling Human Evaluations. SIAM International
Conference on Data Mining (SDM), pp. 181-189, 2015
• Everaldo Aguiar, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Nasir Bhanpuri, David Miller, Ben
Yuhas, Kecia Addison, Shihching Liu, Marilyn Powell and Rayid Ghani. Who,
When, and Why: A Machine Learning Approach to Prioritizing Students
at Risk of not Graduating High School on Time. Learning Analytics and
Knowledge Conference (LAK), pp. 93-102, 2015
• Jon Kleinberg, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil
Mullainathan. Using Big Data to Improve Social Policy. NBER Economics
of Crime Working Group, 2014
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Richard Socher, Chris Manning. Aspect Specific Sentiment Analysis using Hierarchical Deep Learning. NIPS Workshop on Deep
Learning and Representation Learning, 2014
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julian McAuley, Jure Leskovec. What’s in a name ?
Understanding the Interplay between Titles, Content, and Communities in
Social Media. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
(ICWSM), 2013
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Indrajit Bhattacharya, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya. Dynamic Multi-Relational Chinese Restaurant Process for Analyzing Influences
on Users in Social Media. IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
(ICDM), pp. 389-398, 2012
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Hyung-Il-Ahn. TEM: A novel perspective to modeling
content on microblogs. International World Wide Web Conference (WWW),
pp. 563-564, 2012
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Indrajit Bhattacharya, Srujana Merugu. Exploiting Coherence for the Simultaneous Discovery of Latent
Facets and associated Sentiments. SIAM International Conference on Data
Mining (SDM), pp. 498-509, 2011
Best Paper Award
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jitendra Ajmera. Attention prediction on social media
brand pages. ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
(CIKM), pp. 2157-2160, 2011
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Angshu Rai, Srujana Merugu. Smart news feeds for
social networks using scalable joint latent factor models. International World
Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 73-74, 2011
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Angshu Rai. Unified Modeling of User Activities on
Social Networking Sites. NIPS Workshop on Computational Social Science
and the Wisdom of Crowds, 2011
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Hyung-Il Ahn. A Non Parametric Theme Event Topic
Model for Characterizing Microblogs. NIPS Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, 2011
Manuscripts
• Jon Kleinberg, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil
Mullainathan. Human Judgements vs. Machine Predictions
• Yilun Wang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Michal Kosinski, Jure Leskovec. Psychodemographic Analysis of Pictivism: A Case Study of the Facebook Rainbow
Campaign.
• Michal Kosinski, Yilun Wang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec. Extracting Latent Traits from Digital Footprints
• Himabindu Lakkaraju, Richard Socher. Domain Adaptation for Sentiment
Summarization using Deep Belief Networks
Patents
• Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sunil Aravindam, Kaushik
Nath. Extraction and Grouping of Feature Words (US8484228 B2).
• Jitendra Ajmera, Shantanu Godbole, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Ashish Verma,
Ben Roden. Enhancing knowledge bases using rich social media (US20130224714
A1).
Teaching &
Mentoring
• Teaching Assistant at Stanford University
Autumn 2014 & Winter 2016
- Head TA for the course on Social and Information Network Analysis
- Mentored research projects of 13 student teams
Autumn 2014
- TA for the course on Mining Massive Datasets
Winter 2016
• Co-guiding research assistants at Stanford University
• Co-guided interns at IBM Research - India
Sep 2014 - Present
May 2011 - Jul 2011
• Teaching Assistant at Visveswaraiah Technological University
- Object Oriented Programming
- Computer Graphics Lab
Spring 2005
Fall 2006
• Taught Mathematics & English to primary & higher secondary school students
2009 - 10
- Volunteer for Times “Teach India” initiative and UNICEF’s “Awaaz Do”
campaign
Professional
Service
• Reviewer for TKDD 2016, TKDE 2015, KDD 2015, SDM 2015, CIKM 2011,
UAI 2011, AAAI 2011
• Steering Committee Member for ICML Workshop on Interpretable Machine
Learning, 2016
• Student Volunteer for KDD 2015, KDD 2014
• Program Committee Member for Gracehopper India Conference, 2011