Grady Laksmono

About me

Hi, my name is Grady Laksmono. I was born in the second largest city in Indonesia, Surabaya in 1988. I went to school in Indonesia for 15 years, then I attended high school in the United States in 2003. Before I came to the United States, I was one of those who weren’t that much interested with education. I thought that they were useless, so I have never “studied” for any of them but to make sure that I “pass” them. Instead, I spent most of my time with my little Pentium II PC to play computer games, reinstalling the operating systems (including making it to run dual-booted with Linux), trying many computer applications, and writing my own “random” stories using Microsoft Word. What started as a game soon become an interest that defines the person who I am today, and strive to be in the future.

I started to take my education seriously when I was in high school. It was also the first time that I was introduced with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Macromedia Flash (now is Adobe). I don’t remember what grade that I got for those classes,  but I started to use them extensively to develop my first website for a multi-player game team and an internet radio station, which eventually lead me to my first pay-check for becoming a webmaster at the academy (which includes high school, elementary, etc) and the start of my career (and company). I graduated from high school in 2006 with honorable-mention, a college preparatory diploma, and a community service award.

Soon thereafter, I attended California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) majoring in Computer Science. I was working part-time throughout my undergraduate education, mainly as a web programmer at the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology. My responsibility was to develop, design, and maintain the website of the college, and all of the departments who falls under the engineering college, which includes the computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering. My deep interests in the internet and information systems lead me to take higher level courses when I was an undergraduate. I was one of those who take graduate courses (and use them) to substitute my undergraduate requirements. These courses taught advanced web programming and introduced with research, mainly in the area of data mining. I was so fascinated with data mining and its application in our life, so I also took an undergraduate directed research with Professor Chengyu Sun to explore more topics of data mining. I was mainly involved with the research of utilizing the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) multi-cores architecture to process the data mining algorithms. I graduated from CSULA in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

I was debating whether I should be working for a couple of years before pursuing a graduate study. But I was left with too much of curiosity in data mining. So I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Computer Science at University of Southern California (USC). Obviously, I was also debating whether I should go to USC or UCLA (also read the UCLA-USC rivalry), but I have to admit that the faculty at USC is kinder, as they responded to my email. I’m coming to USC with the mind-set to work on the data mining research at the Information Laboratory (InfoLab). After having a conversation with Professor Cyrus Shahabi with the plan for my first semester, I was becoming more excited to work with him. Throughout my first semester at USC, I’ve been working with many very cool and awesome projects. It was the first time, when I experience to work with very large scale of dataset, and had to deal with “OutOfMemoryException”. I also contributed and proposed a technique to protect the user’s privacy in the mobile sensing network.

I’m currently a Research Assistant at USC InfoLab and the Lead Ambassador for Google at USC. Aside of my academic and career life, I like photography, playing badminton and many other sports (soccer, basketball, swimming), and work with graphics (photoshop, web design, 3D games, animation). I utilize Autodesk Maya to create a 3D model and animation, Adobe Photoshop for bitmap manipulation, Audacity for audio editing, and Adobe Flash for 2D animation. I also like to read interesting articles, blogs, and books.