Sebastian Thrun

German-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, a pioneer of probabilistic robotics and self-driving cars. At Carnegie Mellon and then Stanford University he developed methods that let robots localize themselves and build maps under uncertainty using particle filtersparticle filter, n.: A way to track something uncertain, such as a robot's location, by keeping thousands of random guesses, scoring each against what the sensors see, and copying the best ones. and other Bayesian estimators (see simultaneous localization and mappingsimultaneous localization and mapping, n.: How a robot, drone or headset builds a map of an unfamiliar place while at the same time working out where it is on that map, using its cameras or laser scanners.), set out in the textbook 'Probabilistic Robotics' (2005, with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox). He led the Stanford team whose car Stanley won the 2005 DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand Challenge, prop. n.: A series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic. by driving 212 kilometers of desert without human help. At Google he founded the X research lab and led the self-driving car project begun in 2009, the forerunner of Waymo (see autonomous vehicleautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving.). In 2011 he and Peter NorvigPeter Norvig, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook, led research at Google, and helped show that simple methods trained on huge amounts of data often beat clever hand-built ones. taught a free online AI course to some 160,000 students, which led him to found the education company Udacity; he later led the flying-car company Kitty Hawk.