CAHMP’s co-founder/director, Amarda Shehu has been named Mason’s Associate VP of Research for IDIA starting May 25, 2022. In her new role, Amarda will help to shape Mason’s institutional landscape of computing and digital society, while continuing to promote Mason’s research and innovation. Amarda is one of the three founding leaders of CAHMP. Together with Brenda Bannan and Dave Lattanzi, the three co-directors envisioned, brought a team of faculty around that vision, and ultimately were successful in obtaining funding for CAHMP as a Provost Transdisciplinary Center in 2019. CAHMP would not have existed without their visionary proposal in 2019. Under their leadership and CAHMP’s amazing faculty community, we have achieved many feats together, including the submission of the mega proposal of AI Institute, which, in turn, led to a slew of proposals and awards. In addition to our research capacity, CAHMP is also gaining traction on other critical initiatives at Mason, including curriculum development and entrepreneurship.
With Amarda stepping out, we are fortunate and glad to announce that Sanmay Das, Professor of Computer Science, has very graciously accepted to step into Amarda’s role as CAHMP’s new co-director.
As a CS professor, Sanmay has broad interests across AI, machine learning, and computational social science. His research interests are in designing effective algorithms for agents in complex, uncertain environments, and in understanding the social or collective outcomes of individual behavior. Of late, he has been particularly interested in understanding the societal implications of the use of algorithms in allocating scarce societal resources. In the broader AI community outside Mason, Sanmay serves in several roles, including as the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence and as a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Sanmay served as one of the Co-PIs on CAHMP’s AI Institute proposal in 2020 soon after he joined Mason. Since then, he has taken on various leadership roles here at Mason. Sanmay has been instrumental to CAHMP’s mission at advancing human-machine partnership in research, education and technology transfer, and will now continue with that commitment in a new leadership role as a CAHMP co-director. His interdisciplinary research embodies what is best about CAHMP.