Mehran Sahami is an Iranian-born American computer scientist, engineer, and professor. He is the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering, and Professor (Teaching) and Associate Chair for Education in the Computer Science department at
Stanford University.
He is also the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Education
Sahami earned his
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...
degree and
PhD in 1999 from Stanford University
for research supervised by
Daphne Koller
Daphne Koller ( he, דפנה קולר; born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one ...
.
Career and research
Sahami's research interests are in
computer science education
Computer science education or computing education is the art of teaching and learning the discipline of computer science, and computational thinking. As a subdiscipline of pedagogy it also addresses the wider impact of computer science in socie ...
,
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
and
information retrieval.
[
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was a senior ]research scientist
A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences.
In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophic ...
at Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, Inc. as well as a senior engineering manager at Epiphany, Inc.computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
curriculum redesign from a large core to a smaller core with specialization tracks. Some of his lectures are made available on YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
and iTunesU.
His research interests include computer science education, artificial intelligence, and ethics. He served as co-chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula 2013, which created curricular guidelines for college programs in Computer Science at an international level. He has also served as chair of the ACM Education Board, an elected member of the ACM Council, and was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to the state's Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Advisory Panel.
Awards and honors
Sahami was selected by the 2013 graduating senior class to give the annual Class Day Lecture at Stanford University's Commencement Weekend ceremonies.
In 2014, Sahami received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Presidential Award for "outstanding leadership of, and commitment to, the three-year ACM/IEEE-CS effort to produce CS2013, a comprehensive revision of the curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computer science".
References
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Stanford University alumni
Stanford University School of Engineering faculty
Computer science educators
Iranian emigrants to the United States
Google employees
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