PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mehran Sahami

Mehran Sahami is an Iranian-American computer scientist at Stanford and one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology. In 1998, he coauthored "A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail" with David Heckerman, Eric Horvitz and Susan Dumais, and he completed a Stanford PhD supervised by Daphne Koller in 1999. After working as a senior research scientist at Google from 2002 to 2007, he joined the Stanford faculty in 2007, served as associate chair for education until 2022, and founded the EAAI symposium on AI education in 2010. With Rob Reich and Jeremy Weinstein, he co-wrote System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, which the three discussed at a Stanford book talk in October 2021. Since 2023, he is Tencent Chair of Stanford's Computer Science Department, and his recent work includes a randomized trial of GPT-4 chat in an online coding class, published at L@S 2025.

Works
132
Citations
12,875
h-index
31
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1992–1999

    A Stanford PhD with Daphne Koller

    The Iranian-American computer scientist earns a Bachelor of Science at Stanford in 1992 and a PhD there in 1999, with research supervised by Daphne Koller. His thesis is titled Using Machine Learning to Improve Information Access.

  2. July 1998

    A Bayesian junk e-mail filter

    In July 1998, he coauthors "A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail" with David Heckerman, Eric Horvitz and Susan Dumais for the AAAI Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization. The paper casts junk-mail filtering as a decision-theoretic problem, pairing probabilistic learning with differential misclassification costs, and argues that the technology is mature enough for deployment.

  3. 2001–2007

    Senior research scientist at Google

    After his PhD, he works for several years as a senior engineering manager at Epiphany. From 2001 to 2006, he also teaches in Stanford's computer science department as a lecturer, and from 2002 to 2007 he is a full-time senior research scientist at Google, where Sergey Brin recruits him in the company's start-up days. He is one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology and holds over 20 patents on web search, recommendation engines in social networks and email spam filtering.

  4. 2007–2022

    Associate chair for education

    He joins Stanford's computer science faculty in 2007 and consults part-time at Google until 2010. As associate chair for education from 2007 to 2022, he leads the redesign of the undergraduate curriculum from a large core to a smaller core with specialization tracks, and he teaches the introductory programming course taken by nearly 1,500 students per year.

  5. 2009–2010

    A text-mining book and EAAI

    In 2009, he and Ashok Srivastava publish Text Mining: Classification, Clustering, and Applications with Chapman and Hall/CRC, a book on statistical methods for classifying and clustering text. He founds the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) in 2010 and serves as its first chair; the AAAI-sponsored meeting covers teaching AI and using AI in education.

  6. 2014–2019

    CS2013 and ACM honours

    He co-chairs the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula 2013, which creates international guidelines for college computer science programs. In 2014, ACM gives him its Presidential Award for his leadership of the three-year effort to produce CS2013, and in 2019 ACM names him a Distinguished Member.

  7. 2021

    Co-writing System Error

    He co-writes System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot with Stanford political scientists Rob Reich and Jeremy Weinstein. The book explores how the tech industry's fixation on optimization and efficiency erodes privacy and reinforces prejudice, and the three authors discuss it at a Stanford book talk in October 2021.

  8. As of October 2026

    Chair of Stanford computer science

    He becomes chair of Stanford's Computer Science Department in 2023 and is its Tencent Chair, as well as the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). With Chris Piech, Emma Brunskill and others, he coauthors a randomized controlled trial of GPT-4 chat access for 5,831 students in an online coding class, published at L@S 2025. In the 2026–27 academic year, he teaches Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change and Programming Methodology (CS 106A).

Career

  1. Since 2001Stanford UniversityLecturer, Faculty member
  2. 2002–2010GoogleSenior research scientist, Consultant
  3. EpiphanySenior engineering manager

Education

  1. 1999Stanford UniversityBachelor of Science; PhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Supervised and Unsupervised Discretization of Continuous Features1995 · Elsevier eBooks · 1,978 citations
  2. Toward optimal feature selection1996 · 1,482 citationsWith Daphne Koller
  3. Inductive learning algorithms and representations for text categorization1998 · ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) · 1,467 citationsWith David Heckerman and John C. Platt
  4. A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail1998 · 1,212 citationsWith David Heckerman and Eric Horvitz
  5. Deep Knowledge Tracing2015 · 875 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Mehran Sahami. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birthIncludes Mehran Sahami. We estimate that 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birth (520 of 1,198 people with known birth and employment countries).
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Stanford University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Stanford University. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Mehran Sahami yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Mehran Sahami - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Mehran Sahami ai.stanford.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Mehran Sahami - Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) bangaloreliteraturefestival.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor, School of Engineering; Tencent Chair, Computer Science Department, Stanford University | Aspen Ideas aspenideas.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Mehran Sahami's Profile | Stanford Profiles profiles.stanford.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Mehran Sahami - CHM computerhistory.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Text Mining: Classification, Clustering, and Applications i-programmer.info. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. SIGCSE Members named 2019 ACM Distinguished Members sigcse.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. 'System Error, Live!': Stanford experts take on Big Tech in book talk stanforddaily.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  11. About | Computer Science cs.stanford.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  12. The GPT Surprise: Offering Large Language Model Chat in a Massive Coding Class Reduced Engagement but Increased Adopters Exam Performances arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.