David Stavens

Last updated
David Stavens
Born1982 (age 40–41) [1]
Citizenship US
Alma mater Stanford University, Princeton University
Scientific career
Fields Driverless cars, robotics, [2] computer science
Institutions Udacity (co-founder), Nines (co-founder)
Thesis Learning to Drive: Perception for Autonomous Cars  (2011)
Doctoral advisor Sebastian Thrun [3]
Other academic advisors Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li. [4]

David Stavens is an American entrepreneur and scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Udacity, a co-creator of Stanley, [5] [6] [7] [8] the winning car of the second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge, [9] and co-founder and CEO of Nines. [10] [11] [12] Stavens has published in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. [13]

Contents

Early life and education

Stavens grew up in Sioux City, Iowa and attended Princeton University, graduating with a B.S.E. in Computer Science, Magna Cum Laude, at age 19. [14] He is an alumnus of Stanford University's Computer Science department for both M.S. [15] and Ph.D. [16] programs. His Ph.D. was advised by Sebastian Thrun. [17]

Autonomous cars

Stavens was a co-creator on Stanford’s autonomous car team. [18] The team built Stanley, the winner of the second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. Stanley has been on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History [19] and National Air and Space Museum. [20] Academic publications from the team (by Stavens along with Hendrik Dahlkamp, Adrian Kaehler, Sebastian Thrun, Gary Bradski) state that they applied self-supervised learning, to detect drivable surfaces in the desert for self-driving cars which led the vehicle to win the race. [21] Stavens's publications state that they apply the concept of self-supervised learning to autonomous driving with the benefit of avoiding human intervention. [22] [23] His dissertation states that this self-supervised learning approach has the potential to improve human driving performance. [4] The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab awarded Stavens a gold medal "For his groundbreaking contributions to the winning DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle...." [24]

The Stanford autonomous driving team ultimately joined Google as the foundation of Google's self-driving car team (Waymo). [25]

Stavens also made contributions to the 2009 NASA Mars Rover Mission. [26]

Indoor WiFi maps

Stavens also worked on research at Stanford on indoor localization using WiFi signal strength measurements. The goal was to create a system capable of delivering GPS-quality localization indoors, where GPS satellites do not function. He and Jesse Levinson were winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in 2009 which provided $100,000 in funding for the research. [27]

He published the research along with Joseph Huang, David Millman, Morgan Quigley, Sebastian Thrun, and Alok Aggarwal, stating that it produced excellent results in practice. [28] Joseph Huang went on to found an indoor localization start-up, WifiSLAM, [29] that was acquired by Apple. [30]

Online education

Stavens co-founded and was CEO of Udacity. [31] Udacity helped popularize the concept of the offering college courses for free as Massive open online course's (MOOC), [32] intended to make high-quality education accessible and nearly free around the entire world via Internet. [33]

As CEO, he grew the company to 160,000 students and 20 employees. [34] Udacity was valued at $1 billion in 2015. [35] As of 2018, Udacity had over 50,000 paid students and $70 million in revenue. [36]

Related Research Articles

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. A more recent Challenge, the 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Norvig</span> American computer scientist (born 1956)

Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is the co-author with Stuart J. Russell of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robotics Institute</span> Division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014, the article in Robotics Business Review magazine calls it "the world's best robotics research facility" and a "pacesetter in robotics research and education."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simultaneous localization and mapping</span> Computational navigational technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken or the egg problem, there are several algorithms known to solve it in, at least approximately, tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley (vehicle)</span> Autonomous car

Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sebastian Thrun</span> German-American entrepreneur

Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Whittaker</span> American robotisict

Red Whittaker is an American roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed for the DARPA Grand Challenge placing second and third place simultaneously, in the Grand Challenge Races.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DARPA Grand Challenge (2005)</span> Second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge

The second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was a 212 km (132 mi) off-road course that began at 6:40 am on October 8, 2005, near the California/Nevada state line. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.32 mi) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race. Five vehicles successfully completed the course:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dmitri Dolgov</span> Russian-American businessman (born 1977/1978)

Dmitri Dolgov is a Russian-American engineer who is the co-chief executive officer of Waymo. Previously, he worked on self-driving cars at Toyota and at Stanford University for the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007). Dolgov then joined Waymo's predecessor, Google's Self-Driving Car Project, where he served as an engineer and head of software. He has also been Google X's lead scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Ng</span> American artificial intelligence researcher

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Waymo</span> Autonomous car technology company

Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">X (company)</span> Research and development company

X is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Udacity</span> For-profit educational organization

Udacity, Inc. is an American for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses.

Gary Bradski is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Industrial Perception, a company that developed perception applications for industrial robotic application and has worked on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as published a book on that library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Kaehler</span> American computer scientist

Adrian Kaehler is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and author. He is best known for his work on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as two books on that library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of self-driving cars</span> Overview of the history of self-driving cars

Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Levandowski</span> French-American automobile engineer (born 1980)

Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Urmson</span> CEO of self-driving technology company Aurora

Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suchi Saria</span> Indian scientist

Suchi Saria is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, where she uses big data to improve patient outcomes. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. From 2022 to 2023, she was an investment partner at AIX Ventures. AIX Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Estrada (lawyer)</span> American lawyer

David Estrada is a Silicon Valley lawyer and Chief Legal & Policy Officer at Nuro Inc., a Mountain View, California-based robotics and self-driving car startup.

References

  1. ↑ Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12). "Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2018-04-04.
  2. ↑ Thrun, Sebastian; Montemerlo, Mike; Dahlkamp, Hendrik; Stavens, David; Aron, Andrei; Diebel, James; Fong, Philip; Gale, John; Halpenny, Morgan (2007). The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. pp. 1–43. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-73429-1_1. ISBN   9783540734284.
  3. ↑ David Stavens at the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  4. 1 2 "Learning to drive [electronic resource] : perception for autonomous cars in SearchWorks catalog". searchworks.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  5. ↑ Leckart, Steven. "The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever". WIRED. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  6. ↑ "Online pioneer Udacity lands $105 million round and a $1 billion valuation". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  7. ↑ Anderson, Stuart. "Sebastian Thrun: Udacity Would Not Exist Without Immigrants". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  8. ↑ Poletti, Therese. "Why the father of the self-driving car left Google". MarketWatch. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  9. ↑ Davis, Joshua. "Say Hello to Stanley". WIRED. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  10. ↑ "Microsoft Academic". academic.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2021-07-08.[ dead link ]
  11. ↑ Inc, Nines. "Teleradiology Leader Receives FDA Clearance for Its Lung Nodule Measurement Tool Built with Artificial Intelligence". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 2021-07-08.{{cite press release}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  12. ↑ "Leadership of Top Radiology Practice I Nines Teleradiology". www.nines.com. Archived from the original on 2021-07-09. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
  13. ↑ "David Stavens - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  14. ↑ "David Stavens' Homepage". ai.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-04-03.
  15. ↑ "Masters Alumni | Stanford Computer Science". cs.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-04-03.
  16. ↑ "Ph.D Alumni | Stanford Computer Science". cs.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  17. ↑ "David Stavens - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  18. ↑ Poletti, Therese. "Why the father of the self-driving car left Google". MarketWatch. Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  19. ↑ ""Stanley" Robot Car". National Museum of American History. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  20. ↑ "Stanley Moves In". National Air and Space Museum. 2012-11-09. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  21. ↑ Dahlkamp, H.; Kaehler, A.; Stavens, D.; Thrun, S.; Bradski, G. (2006-08-16). Self-supervised Monocular Road Detection in Desert Terrain. Vol. 02. ISBN   9780262693486.
  22. ↑ Stavens, David; Thrun, Sebastian (2006-07-13). A self-supervised terrain roughness estimator for off-road autonomous driving. AUAI Press. pp. 469–476. ISBN   978-0974903927.
  23. ↑ Stavens, D.; Thrun, S. (June 2010). "Unsupervised learning of invariant features using video". 2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp. 1649–1656. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.300.2068 . doi:10.1109/CVPR.2010.5539773. ISBN   978-1-4244-6984-0. S2CID   2187260.
  24. ↑ "David Stavens, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge vision algorithms". searchworks.stanford.edu. 22 November 2009.
  25. ↑ "What we're driving at". Official Google Blog. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  26. ↑ Ghosh, Shona (2013-03-09). "Google Glass: the scientists behind Google's augmented reality glasses". The Daily Telegraph. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  27. ↑ "Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Winners | Qualcomm". Qualcomm. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  28. ↑ Huang, J.; Millman, D.; Quigley, M.; Stavens, D.; Thrun, S.; Aggarwal, A. (May 2011). "Efficient, generalized indoor WiFi GraphSLAM". 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. pp. 1038–1043. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.378.5332 . doi:10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979643. ISBN   978-1-61284-386-5. S2CID   15564688.
  29. ↑ "Indoor location is ready for its second act (exclusive)". VentureBeat. 2012-08-30. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  30. ↑ "Apple Buys Indoor Mapping Company WifiSLAM". Business Insider. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  31. ↑ Cheshire, Tom. "University just got flipped: how online video is opening up knowledge to the world". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2018-04-04.
  32. ↑ "Udacity Official Declares MOOCs 'Dead' (Though the Company Still Offers Them) - EdSurge News". EdSurge. 2017-10-12. Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  33. ↑ "Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course". Fast Company. 2013-11-14. Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  34. ↑ Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12). "Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  35. ↑ "Udacity Raises $105 Million Series D, Bringing Valuation To $1 Billion – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. 11 November 2015. Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  36. ↑ "Udacity, with eye to eventual IPO, says revenue more than doubled..." Reuters. 2018-02-27. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
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