ESP Biography



HIMA LAKKARAJU, CS PhD Student Studying Data Mining




Major: Computer Science

College/Employer: Stanford

Year of Graduation: 2017

Picture of Hima Lakkaraju

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Hima Lakkaraju is currently a graduate student at Stanford, pursuing her PhD in Computer Science. Her research is primarily aimed at analyzing human decision making using machine learning and building machine learning models which are useful to human decision makers.

Hima loves teaching and has been a teaching assistant for several CS classes such as Mining Massive Datasets, Social and Information Network Analysis, Object Oriented Programming etc.

During her spare time, she cooks a variety of Indian food, studies linear algebra, probability theory and machine learning and, watches bollywood movies (not necessarily in that order).



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

M5007: Mathemagic with Cards in Splash Spring 2016 (Apr. 09 - 10, 2016)
Take a regular deck of cards. Ask your friend to call out any two values, like 9 and 4, or 10 and Jack. Chant your favorite magic mantra and shuffle the deck in front of him. Then ask him to scan through the deck, and lo and behold! He will find the two values on two consecutive cards in the deck! How did you make that happen? Welcome to Mathemagic - the art of performing magic tricks which rely on mathematics. In this class, we will demonstrate several card tricks, and explain why they work (including the above trick). Card tricks are a cool way to understand and appreciate mathematical principles from fields as diverse as probability, combinatorics and set theory. Come, fall in love with maths and become a mathemagician!