Kartik Lakhotia
MS in Computer Engineering
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Best place I've been to is Phi-phi island. It's a thin strip of land with mountains, a jungle (sort of) and white sand turquoise water beaches. Extremely laid back and great Thai food.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Finishing the PhD would be a great accomplishment (hopefully happens in Fall 21). Two-three years down the lane, I felt stuck and couldn't generate new ideas to work upon. I almost quit the PhD, but my wife insisted that I continue and create a broader perspective. Thereafter, I published a few papers, two of them being in one of the highly sought after Computer Science conferences. Those two papers were great achievements given where I was coming from.
What's your favorite impulse purchase from the past 12 months?
Car - I bought a Passat Diesel premium in a day. Went to dealerships, test drove some cars and got turned down on the car I actually set out to buy. Got a phone call in the evening about some deal on this other car and bought it the next morning. It turned out to be good because you get renewable diesel in California which aligns with my environmental friendly goals (still try to take public transport as much as possible).
Please describe a little about your research and what excites you about it
I work on parallel algorithms for graphs that model relationships in data. The algorithms I develop make it feasible to mine useful information from these abstract structures in a reasonable time. Recently, I have worked on some notorious analytics that are very difficult to parallelize. Finding new insights in them and coming up with these ideas that nobody else thought of really excites me. I also love to work on parallel computing platforms and am really amazed by how large-scale systems are built on top of them. Those are some really complex hardware+software collaborations.
If you could choose any other profession outside of engineering or computer science, what would it be?
My pick for an alternate profession would be a Forest Officer in India - love outdoors, love forests andtropical forests have a lot of animal biodiversity
What are some factors that helped you decide to pursue your PhD at USC?
I was a hardware engineer and wanted to move up the computing stack - more towards algorithms or high-level optimization. My advisor works on this mix of FPGA (hardware) + high-level optimization techniques which was quite a fit. Although in the end, I did not do any FPGA stuff in my PhD.
If you were to recommend to an incoming student 3 places to go in California/Los Angeles, what would they be?
I love California and absolutely love Los Angeles. Three must go places for me would be Venice beach (it's a really cool and hip place), Joshua Tree national park (best night sky I've ever seen in my life) and Idyllwild (mountains, snow, hiking, skiing, small bistros, what more does one want).
What is a memory you'll cherish about your time at USC?
I will certainly remember my Teaching Assistantship under Prof. Puvvada Gandhi. He works really hard for his course and expects you to do the same. Initially, it can feel like way more work than fellow TAs, but the response from him and from the students in the class is extremely rewarding. I actually used to look forward to my TA work as a source of joy.
What's one thing about you that might surprise me?
My love for adventure activities would surprise anyone who knows me. I am a really easy person to scare. I shout and scream when watching a horror movie or when on a(mini) roller coaster, at times to the great embarrassment of my wife. But I still love doing all of that. I mean I regret immediately once I am in that situation, but before that I really want to give it a shot. That, and tattoo :P
What are your plans after graduation?
Not much to be honest. Taking a couple of weeks break to help with my wife's residency applications and then I will be joining Intel labs. I plan to go home soon, my dog back in my hometown is growing old and I want to spend some time with her.
Hometown (city, country)
Sumerpur in Pali district, India.
Personal Website (if any)
https://kartiklakhotia.wixsite.com/mysite
Faculty Advisor
Academic Advisor - Diane Demetras
Thesis Advisor - Viktor Prasanna
