Sebastian Thrun

Thrun is running a small stealth start-up at the intersection of AI and e-commerce.

Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the new Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL); now Adjunct Professor. At Stanford, Thrun ran the Stanford Racing Team, which in 2005 won the DARPA Grand Challenge, an inaugural race of self-driving cars. As a faculty member ,Thrun published over 400 academic papers and 12 books.With a h-index of 160 he is ocnsistently ranked among the top 15 computer scientists worldwide, see https://research.com/scientists-rankings/computer-science .

Thrun founded Udacity, an online educational tech platform that has educated tens of millions of individuals worldwide in areas such as AI, machine learning, and software and Web development. In 2024, Thrun sold Udacity to Accenture. Thrun is widely considered the "Godfather" of the MOOC, the massive open online course. Udacity was also the driving force behind the low-cost Master's program in computer science at Georgia Tech, where Thrun serves as an adjunct professor t o the present day.

Thrun founded and ran Kittyhawk, a leading eVTOL or "flying car" company. With over 30,000 successful flights Kitty Hawk built more than 100 electric eVTOL vehicles that take off vertically, fly, and land, powered electrically. Kittyhawk sold its flagship team and technology to Boeing, where it is now operated as Wisk.aero.

In 2009, he founded Google[x], which quickly became Google's innovation factory. Thrun founded and led a number of projects at Google: Streetview, Ground Truth (Google's global mapping effort), Waymo, Google Glass, Google Brain, Google Wing, GCam, and others. Google Brain revolutionized YouTube Gemini, Google's most advanced AI effort. Waymo is the leader in the self-driving car industry.

Honorary Doctorate - Computer Science

Honorary Doctorate

Honorary Doctorate

Honorary Doctorate

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) - Computer Science and Statistics