Mehran Sahami

Associate Professor (Teaching) of Computer Science
Associate Chair for Education and Director of Educational Affairs, Computer Science
Robert N. Noyce Faculty Fellow in the School of Engineering
Gates Building, Room 180
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Email: sahami at cs.stanford.edu
Office Phone: (650) 723-6059

My office hours for Spring quarter are Tuesdays 11am-12noon and Thursdays at 2pm-4pm in Gates 180.

Bio

In 2007, I joined the Computer Science Department at Stanford University as Associate Professor (Teaching) and Associate Chair for Education. From 2001 to 2006, I also taught in the CS department at Stanford as a Lecturer. From 2002-2007, I was a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where I continue to maintain a consulting appointment in the research group. My research interests include computer science education, machine learning, and information retrieval on the Web. Please see my publications web page for more information.

Previously, I worked for several years as a Senior Engineering Manager at Epiphany. Prior to working at Epiphany, I completed my PhD in the Computer Science Department at Stanford. I was also an undergrad at Stanford and I loved it so much that I didn't want to leave.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with family, playing the guitar, going on outdoor excursions, and sleeping (which seems to be getting rarer and rarer these days).

Coming Changes to the Undegraduate Computer Science Major!

If you're a student majoring in (or considering majoring in) Computer Science, you might be interested in an overview of the new undergraduate CS curriculum. We think you'll like what you see!

Additional documents defining the new curricular requirements are also available here.

Current Stuff O' Interest (i.e., Professional Activities)

2008 AAAI Spring Symposium on Using AI to motivate greater participation in Computer Science.
Selected Publications
Classes that I'm currently scheduled to teach this year (2008-09) are:
- Fall 2008-09: CS106A: Programming Methodology and CS298: Seminar on Teaching Introductory Computer Science.
- Winter 2008-09: CS103B: Discrete Structures.
- Spring 2008-09: CS109: Introduction to Probability for Computer Scientists.
If you are thinking about Computer Science as a potential major, you can find more information here.
Here's a video a former student of mine posted on YouTube about it being a great time to be a computer scientist.
This past summer I organized the Google Education Summit. A posting on the Google blog provides more information about the summit and has links to the presentations given there.

Older Stuff That You Might Still Want Links To

With Thorsten Joachims, Andrew McCallum and Lyle Ungar, I co-organized an IJCAI-99 workshop on Machine Learning for Information Filtering.
With Ronny Kohavi, I co-organized a panel entitled Integrating Data Mining into Vertical Solutions: Problems and Challenges at KDD-99.
I organized the ICML/ AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization with Mark Craven, Thorsten Joachims, and Andrew McCallum. To see what was included in the workshop, you can still obtain the workshop program (including the list of accepted papers). The workshop proceedings are now available as a technical report from AAAI.
In the days of yore I was a Resident Fellow at Naranja House in Lagunita Court for four years.
More teaching! Some of the other classes that I may teach from time to time include: