David Stavens

David Stavens is an American entrepreneur and scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Udacity, a co-creator of Stanley, the winning car of the second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and co-founder and CEO of Nines. Stavens has published in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. 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. He is an alumnus of Stanford University's Computer Science department for both M.S. and Ph.D. programs. His Ph.D. was advised by Sebastian Thrun. Autonomous cars Stavens was a co-creator on Stanford’s autonomous car team. 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 and National Air and Space Museum. 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. Stavens's publications state that they apply the concept of self-supervised learning to autonomous driving with the benefit of avoiding human intervention. His dissertation states that this self-supervised learning approach has the potential to improve human driving performance. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab awarded Stavens a gold medal "For his groundbreaking contributions to the winning DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle...." The Stanford autonomous driving team ultimately joined Google as the foundation of Google's self-driving car team (Waymo).