UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s AI (artificial intelligence) Hub will host Mehran Sahami, the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor and Tencent Chair of the Computer Science department, Stanford University, as the next speaker in its AI Distinguished lecture series. Sahami’s lecture will explore the potential promise and perils of machine learning, a technology with tremendous potential for developing tools to improve efficiency and accuracy in decision-making across various domains.

This lecture is open to the public and will take place on April 26 from 1-3 p.m. in 134 HUB. Admission is free, but attendees must register in advance. For more information, please visit the event website.

As Sahami will discuss, while machine learning can be a valuable tool, it also has the potential to lead to outcomes that reinforce human biases, disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, and violate notions of privacy. His talk will delve into the ethical issues and competing value trade-offs at stake when harnessing the power of machine learning. Sahami will examine what society might do to continue to harness the power of technology while better mitigating some of the ethical challenges it poses, not only from a technological standpoint, but from one of collective action.

Sahami’s research interests include computer science education, machine learning, and ethics. He served as co-chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula 2013, and was appointed by California Gov. Jerry Brown to the state’s Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Advisory Panel. He is a co-author with Rob Reich and Jeremy Weinstein of the book “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.”

Representatives from the Center for Immersive Experiences — CIE — also will be on hand to demonstrate the center’s virtual headsets.