Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967, in Solingen, West Germany) is a German-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and educator with citizenship in Germany and the United States.^[22] Educated at the University of Hildesheim and the University of Bonn, where he completed his 1995 thesis "Explanation-Based Neural Network Learning: A Lifelong Learning Approach" under doctoral advisors Armin B. Cremers and Tom Mitchell, his academic career includes affiliations with Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, where he serves as an adjunct professor.^[25,41,20] His primary fields of work are artificial intelligence and robotics, and his doctoral students have included Frank Dellaert, John Langford, Joëlle Pineau, and David Stavens.^[18,19]

Thrun is known for his work in self-driving cars, robotics, artificial intelligence, and online education, and he is the co-founder of Google X and Udacity, as well as the former chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation.^{[25,41,12,26,27]} He is widely recognized for his contributions to autonomous driving systems, particularly as the leader of the Google Chauffeur Project (now known as Waymo) and as the leader of the Stanford Racing team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, an event widely credited with accelerating research in self-driving technology.^[29,28] His honors include the 2003 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and election as an AAAI Fellow in 2006.

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.^[30] 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.^[31]

In 1995, Thrun joined Carnegie Mellon University as a research computer scientist in the Computer Science Department.^[32] In 1998, he became assistant professor and director of the Robot Learning Laboratory, later serving as the Finmeccanica Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics.^[33] During this period, he developed Minerva, an autonomous robotic museum tour guide deployed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 1998. The robot interacted with thousands of visitors over a two-week deployment and contributed to advances in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).^[34] He also led the Nursebot project, which focused on assistive robots in elder care environments.^[35,36]

Thrun co-founded the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD), later renamed the Machine Learning Department, recognized as the first academic department dedicated to machine learning. He co-chaired its early graduate program, the Master’s in Automated Learning and Discovery, which formed the basis for later machine learning doctoral programs at Carnegie Mellon University.^[37]

In 2003, Thrun joined Stanford University as an associate professor. In 2004, he re-established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), originally founded in 1963 by John McCarthy, and served as its director.^[18] In 2004, Thrun also founded the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference, which has since become a major venue in robotics research. He was promoted to full professor of computer science and electrical engineering in 2007, and he now serves as an adjunct professor at Stanford.

At Stanford, he led the development of Stanley, the autonomous vehicle that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge by completing a 212-kilometer desert course in approximately 6 hours and 54 minutes, earning a $2 million prize.^[39,38] The vehicle is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.^[40,60] His team also developed Junior, which placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.^[40,60]

In 2011, Thrun joined Google as a Google Fellow and Vice President. He co-founded Google X (the “moonshot factory”) with Yoky Matsuoka and Astro Teller, an advanced research lab focused on experimental and high-risk technology projects.^[42] At X, he initiated Project Chauffeur, Google’s autonomous vehicle program, which later became Waymo in 2016. Waymo has since developed into one of the major autonomous ride-hailing companies, operating large-scale autonomous driving systems on public roads.^[24]

He also co-founded Google Brain, a deep learning research initiative that contributed to large-scale neural network systems used in products such as YouTube and later influenced the development of transformer-based architectures. Google Brain later merged with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind, and today forms the backbone of Google’s Gemini platform.^[43]

In 2011, Thrun taught a free online artificial intelligence course at Stanford University, which attracted approximately 160,000 students from 190 countries and became a major early event in the massive open online course (MOOC) movement. He is often referred to in media as the “Godfather of the MOOC.” In 2012, he co-founded Udacity, an online education company focused on technical training and “nanodegree” programs.^[50,49] The platform has served tens of millions of learners globally and was sold to Accenture in 2024.^[51]

Thrun also collaborated with Georgia Tech and Zvi Galil to develop the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS), a low-cost online graduate degree program. The program has graduated more than 10,000 students and has been described by Forbes as “The Greatest Degree Program Ever.”^[52]

Thrun co-founded Zee.Aero with Larry Page, a company focused on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, which later became Kitty Hawk Corporation, where he served as CEO.^[53] The company developed the Flyer, a personal electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft designed to enable rapid pilot training, and Cora, an autonomous air taxi prototype.^[54] In 2019, the Cora program was separated into a joint venture with Boeing under the name Wisk Aero, which continues to develop autonomous aircraft for urban air mobility applications. Kitty Hawk subsequently ceased operations.^[55]

Thrun co-founded Cresta in 2017, a company focused on AI systems for contact centers that provide real-time assistance, automation, and workflow optimization for customer service operations.^[56] He also founded Sage AI Labs, which developed “GOLD,” an AI-based shopping platform focused on personalized and automated commerce experiences using agent-based systems.^[57]

Thrun is widely recognized for his contributions to autonomous driving systems.^[58] His work includes leadership of the Stanford Racing Team's Stanley vehicle, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge; development of Junior, which placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge; and foundational work at Google that led to Project Chauffeur, later developed into Waymo.^[61,59] His research contributed to perception systems, navigation, probabilistic decision-making, and large-scale robotic autonomy.

Together with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, Thrun helped establish probabilistic robotics, a field that applies statistical methods to robotics problems such as localization, mapping, and navigation.^[62] Their book Probabilistic Robotics (2005, MIT Press) is widely used in the field and has been translated into multiple languages. Key contributions include Monte Carlo localization, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and probabilistic mapping and navigation algorithms.^[65,63,64]

Thrun contributed to or co-founded several projects at Google and Google X, including Google X itself around 2010, an active experimental research laboratory known as a "moonshot factory". In mapping, he worked on Google Street View (2007), an active panoramic mapping imagery system, as well as Project Ground Truth (around 2008), an active mapping data infrastructure.

His work in computing and artificial intelligence includes Google Brain (2011), a deep learning research division later merged into Google DeepMind, and GCam (2011), an active computational photography system. In autonomous navigation and delivery, he contributed to Project Chauffeur (Waymo) in 2009, an active autonomous vehicle program, and Project Wing around 2012, an active drone delivery system operating as an Alphabet subsidiary. Other initiatives include Google Glass (2012), a wearable computing platform that was discontinued for consumers, and Project Loon (around 2011), a balloon-based internet system that was shut down in 2021.

They received honorary doctorates and honors from Delft University of Technology (2016), Instituto Politécnico Nacional (2016), University of Hildesheim (2020), and Georgia Institute of Technology (2024). Their academy memberships and fellowships include the National Academy of Engineering (2007), the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2007), AAAI Fellow (2006), and EurAI Fellow (2006).

Early honors include the NSF CAREER Award in 1999 and the Olympus Award by the German Society for Pattern Recognition in 2001. In 2005, he won the DARPA Grand Challenge, followed by receiving the World Technology Award in 2006 and the Braunschweig Research Prize in 2007.

In 2010, he received the IEEE ITSS Distinguished Researcher Award and the Crunchie / TechCrunch Award. The following year, in 2011, he was awarded the Max Planck Research Award and the AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize. He later received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in 2012 and the Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrants Award in 2013.

In 2005, they were named one of the "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science, followed by inclusion in the Scientific American 50 in 2006. Fast Company ranked them as the fifth-most creative person in the business world in 2011, and in 2012, they were listed at No. 4 on Foreign Policy magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers. Later honors include being named to the Wired 25 in 2018 and achieving a #2 worldwide ranking in robotics by ScholarGPS in 2025.

Thrun completed his PhD thesis in 1995 at the University of Bonn. In 1998, he published "Learning Metric-Topological Maps for Indoor Navigation" in Artificial Intelligence, followed in 1999 by Fox et al.'s publication of "Monte Carlo Localization" at AAAI. Thrun et al. later authored "Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva" in IJRR in 2000. With W. Burgard and D. Fox, Thrun authored Probabilistic Robotics, published by MIT Press in 2005. In 2006, Thrun et al. published "Stanley: The robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge" in the Journal of Field Robotics.