IST professor named to ACM Distinguished Speaker Program

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Prasenjit Mitra, a professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) has been appointed as a Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Speakers serve a three-year term during which they travel to ACM chapters and events to deliver lectures on their fields of expertise.

“Prasenjit’s unwavering commitment to advancing the fields of data sciences and artificial intelligence has played an important role in our college’s growth,” said Andrea Tapia, interim dean of the College of IST. “We are so proud that he is lending his time to this important program for the computing community and confident that he will bring the same dedication to his speakership that he has to Penn State.”

The ACM Distinguished Speaker Program brings speakers from academia, industry and government to give presentations to ACM chapters, members and the greater IT community in a variety of venues and formats, according to the organization’s website. Through its network of high-quality speakers, the outreach program aims to facilitate professional networking and provide some of the best content ACM has to offer.

“I want to share my knowledge of the exciting advances in artificial intelligence research among scholarly communities and practitioners across the world, especially in places across where there is immense potential of young talent but not enough resources,” Prasenjit said. “ACM supports the flight costs that make it possible for such communities to be able to better connect with the worldwide scholarly community in computing. I hope to be able to inspire the next generation of young scholars from these communities.”

Mitra earned his bachelor of technology degree, with honors, in computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and his master of science degree in computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Mitra joined Penn State as an assistant professor in August 2003. He received tenure and promotion to associate professor in July 2010, and became a full professor in July 2014. He was the founding director of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Penn State. He specializes in artificial intelligence, big data analytics, health informatics, natural language processing, information retrieval, web search and data mining, digital libraries and recommender systems.