Pramod Khargonekar

The community is invited to celebrate Engineers Week with a public lecture by Pramod Khargonekar of the University of California, Irvine, 5:30-7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19 at Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos.

Khargonekar, the vice chancellor for research and professor of electrical engineering and computer science, will present “Future of Work and Workers in the AI Era”. As automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies continue their remarkably rapid development, it is expected that many facets of work and lives of workers will be impacted. In this talk, Khargonekar will discuss some data and insights from historical examples of technological impacts on work and workers in the Industrial Revolution, followed by a discussion of AI as a general purpose technology. He also will cover emerging knowledge about how AI developments and a human-centered approach are impacting work and workers.

This event is free to the public and is sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Engineering Leadership Council, National Security Education Center, Los Alamos ScienceFest, J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee and New Mexico Consortium.

Prior to his arrival at UC Irvine in 2016, Khargonekar was on the faculty at the University of Florida, the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan. In 2013, he was appointed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to serve as assistant director for the Directorate of Engineering and served as a member of the NSF senior leadership and management team. Khargonekar’s research and teaching interests include systems and control theory, machine learning and applications to smart electric grid and neural engineering. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Federation of Automatic Control and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has won the Control Systems Award, Baker Prize, Control Systems Society Bode Lecture Prize and CSS Axelby Award from IEEE.