Po-Shen Loh (Carnegie Mellon University)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/events/th...
Theoretically Speaking

The scale of global societal problems looks daunting. One person, or even a small team, is minuscule relative to the number of people who need help. For example, since ChatGPT has exploded onto the scene, our children's future employment prospects (and current educational experience, with ChatGPT-powered cheating) are in existential danger. There is an area close to mathematics, however, which devises solutions in which problems solve themselves even through self-serving human behavior: game theory.

Po-Shen Loh is a math professor, researcher, and educator who transitioned to devise new solutions for large-scale real-world problems. He will talk about his experience going between the ivory tower of academia and the practicality of the real world, where he ultimately innovated fundamentally new approaches to pandemic control (https://novid.org) and scalable advanced live math education (https://live.poshenloh.com).

He will also discuss educational strategies that build relevant skills to survive this new era of Generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT). He has been working extensively on that problem, and draws from experience teaching across the entire spectrum, from underprivileged schools to the International Math Olympiad.

Po-Shen Loh is a social entrepreneur and inventor working across the spectrum of mathematics, education, and healthcare, all around the world. He is a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the national coach of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad team. He holds math degrees from Caltech and Cambridge, and a PhD from Princeton. As an academic, Po-Shen has earned distinctions ranging from an International Mathematical Olympiad silver medal to the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He was the coach of Carnegie Mellon University’s math team when it achieved its first-ever #1 rank among all North American universities, and the coach of the USA Math Olympiad team when it achieved its first-ever back-to-back #1-rank victories in 2015 and 2016, and then again in 2018 and 2019. His research and educational outreach takes him to cities across the world, reaching over 10,000 people each year through public lectures and events, and he has featured in or co-created videos totaling over 19 million YouTube views.