astronomy

Mehran Sahami

Mehran Sahami is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mehran Sahami rather than just read about it. In short: Mehran Sahami is an Iranian-American computer scientist, engineer, and professor. He is the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering, and Professor (Teaching) and Chair of the Computer Science department at Stanford University.

Key takeaways

Mehran Sahami belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mehran Sahami to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mehran Sahami from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mehran Sahami is an Iranian-American computer scientist, engineer, and professor. He is the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering, and Professor (Teaching) and Chair of 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 degree in 1992 and PhD in 1999 from Stanford University for research supervised by Daphne Koller.

Career and research Sahami's research interests are in computer science education, machine learning and information retrieval. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was a senior research scientist at Google, Inc. as well as a senior engineering manager at Epiphany, Inc. Sahami teaches the introductory computer science sequence at Stanford. He led Stanford's computer science curriculum redesign from a large core to a smaller core with specialization tracks. Some of his lectures are made available on YouTube 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". In 2019, he was elected an ACM Distinguished Member.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mehran Sahami

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mehran Sahami claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mehran Sahami before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mehran Sahami ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mehran Sahami

In research: Mehran Sahami appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mehran Sahami in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mehran Sahami is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1970 births, Computer science educators, Google employees, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mehran Sahami outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mehran Sahami in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mehran Sahami means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mehran Sahami out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mehran Sahami in simple terms?

Why does Mehran Sahami matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mehran Sahami?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mehran Sahami.