Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and educator.[4] He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University and is known for his work in self-driving cars,[5] robotics,[6] artificial intelligence, and online education.[7] He is the co-founder of Google X,[8] co-founder of Udacity,[9] and former chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation.[10] He is widely recognized for his contributions to autonomous driving systems, particularly as leader of the Google Chauffeur Project (now known as Waymo)[11] and as the leader of the Stanford Racing that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, an event widely credited with accelerating research in self-driving technology.[12] Thrun was born in Solingen, West Germany, to Winfried and Kristin (Grüner) Thrun. He studied computer science, economics, and medicine at the University of Hildesheim, where he earned his Vordiplom (intermediate diploma) in 1988.[13] He later transferred to the University of Bonn, receiving a Diplom in 1993 and completing a PhD summa cum laude in computer science and statistics in 1995. His doctoral dissertation, Explanation-Based Neural Network Learning: A Lifelong Learning Approach, was supervised by Armin B. Cremers and Tom Mitchell.[14] In 1995, Thrun joined Carnegie Mellon University as a research computer scientist in the Computer Science Department.[15]