Kiran Lakkaraju Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Kiran Lakkaraju is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, California in the Systems Research & Analysis III group.

Kiran’s research has been marked by extensive interdisciplinary efforts that bring together the social and computational sciences. Currently, he is investigating how wargaming techniques can be used to systematically and quantitatively study national security relevant topics, such as cyber deterrence, conflict escalation, and consensus building.

Education

Kiran has a background in artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems and computational social science. He holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Awards

Finalist for the Barchi Prize for paper “Experimental wargaming with SIGNAL” (2021).

Selected Publications

Letchford, J., Epifanovskaya, L., Lakkaraju, K., Armenta, M., Reddie, A., Goldblum, B. L., Whetzel, J., Reinhardt, J., Balanaga, V., Chen, A., Fabian, N., Hingorani, S., Iyer,  R., Krishnan, R., Laderman, S., Lee, M., Mohan, J., Nacht, M., Prakkamakul, S., … Zhang, C. (2022). Experimental Wargaming with SIGNAL. Military Operations Research, 27(2), 59–82.

A. W. Reddie, B. L. Goldblum, K. Lakkaraju, J. Reinhardt, M. Nacht, and L. Epifanovskaya, “Next-generation wargames,” Science, vol. 362, no. 6421, pp. 1362–1364, Dec. 2018, doi: 10.1126/science.aav2135.

K. Lakkaraju, L. Epifanovskaya, M. Stites, J. Letchford, J. Reinhardt, and J. Whetzel, “Online Games for

J. Lee and K. Lakkaraju, “Predicting social ties in massively multiplayer online games,” in International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction, 2014, pp. 95–102.[1]

S. Sarkar, P. Shakarian, D. Sanchez, M. Armenta, and K. Lakkaraju, “Use of a controlled experiment and computational models to measure the impact of sequential peer exposures on decision making,” PLOS ONE, vol. 15, no. 7, p. e0234875, Jul. 2020, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234875 [2]

A. L. Beck, K. Lakkaraju, and V. Rai, “Small is big: Interactive trumps passive information in breaking information barriers and impacting behavioral antecedents.,” PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 1, p. e0169326, 2017, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169326. [1]

K. Lakkaraju, “Modeling attitude diffusion and agenda setting: the MAMA model,” Social Network Analysis and Mining, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2016, doi: 10.1007/s13278-016-0322-4.