Textbook of AI

1967–, Computer scientist, roboticist

Sebastian Thrun is a German-American computer scientist whose Stanford robotics team won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with Stanley, a Volkswagen Touareg modified to autonomously navigate a 132-mile desert course. The result was the first major demonstration that machine-learning-based perception and probabilistic state estimation could enable practical autonomous driving.

Thrun founded the Google Self-Driving Car Project (now Waymo) in 2009 and led it until 2013. He co-founded Udacity with David Stavens in 2011, an early MOOC platform with a strong autonomous-vehicle and software-engineering focus. His textbook Probabilistic Robotics (with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, 2005) is the standard reference for probabilistic state estimation in robotics, particle filters, Kalman filters, occupancy grids, SLAM.

Thrun's later work has spanned medical AI (a 2017 paper showing dermatologist-level skin-cancer classification by a deep CNN), educational technology, and entrepreneurship.