Nik Marda

Tech & Politics @Stanford

What I Do

I'm a senior at Stanford University, where I'm pursuing a M.S. in computer science and a B.A. in political science. I work on problems at the intersection of technology and government, focusing on artificial intelligence, civic technology, and technology policy. In the process, I've taken on roles in engineering, product, research, and policy. This summer, I'm a fellow at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, where I'm supporting the Ethics, Writing, and Threat Analysis teams. If you want to get in touch, feel free to send me an email, reach out on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter!

What I've Done

Built things...

• Created cloud-related tools and tutorials as a Product Management Fellow and Civic Digital Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. I worked on the National Center for Biotechnology Information's website, which is one of the most accessed federal websites with over 1.5 billion visits per year.
• Increasing the accessibility and transparency of data about Stanford University as a co-founder of the Stanford Open Data Project.
• Leading a team of 10+ Stanford editors as a co-founder of ApplicationFlow. We apply research-backed crowdsourcing methods to offer a much more affordable and ethical college consulting service, as well as a pro-bono service for FLI students.

Researched with...

• Stanford Political Science Department, where I'm working on my honors thesis.
• Tech Talent Project, where I worked on improving technical capacity across the federal government.
• Stanford Technology Law Review, where I served as a UG editor for the 2019-20 academic year.
• Stanford Cyber Policy Center, where I researched technical, policy, and legal solutions to deepfakes.
• Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, where I wrote code to study teamwork.
• MIT Mathematics Department, where I worked on an open problem in combinatorial geometry.

Wrote stuff...

• Published a paper on team viability and fracture at the 2019 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
• Led a team that authored a proposal for civic technology loan forgiveness, and was recognized for it in Inside Higher Ed and the final report of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.
• Serving as a Senior Editor for Stanford Politics, where I lead a team of editors on technology, security, and international relations.
• Penned op-eds about voting issues in undergraduate elections and why hacking for coronavirus needs more humility. The latter was featured in The Fountain Hopper, the Stanford Politics Monday Memo, the Stanford CS + Social Good newsletter, and CS 184: Bridging Policy and Tech Through Design, where I was also invited to speak about it.
• Wrote an article on how to better educate AI practitioners to build AI in support of better mental health. This was based on a CS class that I helped teach in Spring 2020 called Wellness in Tech.
• Wrote a paper on new machine learning algorithms for building external features into sentence embeddings and semantic similarity scores, and tested it on political tweets.
• Wrote a paper on the obstacles to equal distribution of points among planar cell decompositions and generalized the Erdos-Szekeres Conjecture for a new set of geometrical objects.
• Authored columns for The Post-Bulletin, the largest newspaper in Southeastern Minnesota.

Crunched numbers...

• As a data scientist for a very competitive 2018 Congressional race, I applied data science and machine learning techniques to prepare a report on improving the candidate's visibility. The recommendations were followed by the campaign.
• As Director of Technology for Stanford in Government, I developed an algorithm to optimize the fellowship matching process for nearly 500 applicants.
• I was a teaching assistant for Art of Problem Solving, where I helped hundreds of students across over a dozen advanced math classes.
• Back in the day, I won the Minnesota State Math Tournament. I also led my high school team to 4th Place at the 2016 & 2017 State Tournaments after not qualifying for the State Tournament since 2005.

Talked a lot...

• Spoke on "The Dot-Gov Boom" panel, which focused on building modern websites for the federal government. My comments were picked up in multiple news outlets and I got a dope picture out of it.
• Answered many phone calls as a legislative intern for Senator Amy Klobuchar during an impeachment trial, escalating tensions with Iran, the decisive phase of the Democratic primary, and a global pandemic. Also wrote numerous memos on topics such as rural broadband, unfair advertising by Big Tech, data coordination to combat human trafficking, and tech-induced mental illnesses.
• Co-hosted the Solving Systems Podcast, a biweekly conversation with calculus teacher Jake Johnson. It was an iTunes Top 150 Education Podcast.
• Many moons ago, I convinced enough people that I understood international politics to qualify for the Minnesota State Speech Competition in Extemporaneous Speaking.

Drank many cups of coffee...

• Artificial Intelligence
  I took CS 221 (Artificial Intelligence) and CS 229 (Machine Learning). My sleep took a toll.
• Artificial Intelligence: Ethics Edition
  Coursework has included The Philosophy & Ethics of Information at Oxford, Designing AI for Human Well-Being, Social & Economic Impact of AI, Building Trust in Autonomy, and Seminar on AI Safety.
• Computer Science
  Finished the core and dumped it too.
• Mathematics
  Took the Honors Discrete Math Sequence. Never taking MTWThF 9:30s again.
• Political Science
  Completed graduate coursework in American Political Institutions and High-Stakes Politics. In Data Science for Politics, I created the class's most accurate model for the 2018 House elections, predicting 234 Democrats overall (there were 235) with 94% accuracy by race. @FiveThirtyEight please hire me!
• Product & Design
  Alumnus of ME410A (Tech and Innovation Foresight), CS147 (Human-Computer Interaction), and CS278 (Social Computing).
• Random
  Some of the best classes I've taken were Creative Nonfiction, Humanities Core, and Social Dance.

In between cups of coffee, I...

• Was named a 2020 Truman Scholar and 2017 Coca-Cola Scholar
• Joined the advisory boards of Stanford's Haas Center and Georgetown's CSET Foretell
• Jumped out of a plane
• Biked from Stanford to a Taco Bell in San Francisco
• Received my 2nd degree black belt in karate
• Stargazed a lot

Last updated Jul 2020 || Inspired by Daniel Zhao