Biography:David Stavens

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Short description: American computer scientist
David Stavens
Born1982 (age 41–42)[1]
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materStanford University, Princeton University
Scientific career
FieldsSelf-driving cars, robotics,[2] computer science
InstitutionsUdacity (co-founder), Stanford Self-Driving Car Team (co-founder), Nines (co-founder)
ThesisLearning to Drive: Perception for Autonomous Cars (2011)
Doctoral advisorSebastian Thrun[3]
Other academic advisorsAndrew 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 self-driving car of the DARPA Grand Challenge;[9] and co-founder and CEO of Nines, a creator of AI-enabled FDA-approved medical devices.[10][11][12][13] Stavens has published in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and has helped start organizations with an aggregate market value of over $30 billion.[14][15]

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.[16] He is an alumnus of Stanford University's Computer Science department for both M.S.[17] and Ph.D.[18] programs. His Ph.D. was advised by Sebastian Thrun.[19]

Autonomous cars

Stavens was a co-creator on Stanford’s autonomous car team.[20] 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[21] and National Air and Space Museum.[22] 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.[23] Stavens's publications state that they apply the concept of self-supervised learning to autonomous driving with the benefit of avoiding human intervention.[24][25] 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...."[26]

The Stanford autonomous driving team ultimately joined Google as the foundation of Google's self-driving car team (Waymo).[27]

Stavens also made contributions to the 2009 NASA Mars Rover Mission.[28]

Indoor WiFi maps

Stavens 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.[29]

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.[30] Joseph Huang went on to found an indoor localization start-up, WifiSLAM,[31] that was acquired by Apple.[32]

Online education

Stavens co-founded and was CEO of Udacity.[33] Udacity helped popularize the concept of the offering college courses for free as Massive open online course's (MOOC),[34] intended to make high-quality education accessible and nearly free around the entire world via Internet.[35]

As CEO, he grew the company to 160,000 students and 20 employees.[36] Udacity was valued at $1 billion in 2015.[37] As of 2018, Udacity had over 50,000 paid students and $70 million in revenue.[38]

References

  1. Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12). "Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online" (in en-US). Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303299604577326302609615094. 
  2. Thrun, Sebastian; Montemerlo, Mike; Dahlkamp, Hendrik; Stavens, David; Aron, Andrei; Diebel, James; Fong, Philip; Gale, John et al. (2007) (in en). 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. 4.0 4.1 "Learning to drive [electronic resource : perception for autonomous cars in SearchWorks catalog"] (in en). https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/9238350. 
  5. Leckart, Steven. "The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever" (in en-US). WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/. Retrieved 2018-03-14. 
  6. "Online pioneer Udacity lands $105 million round and a $1 billion valuation" (in en-US). USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/11/11/online-pioneer-udacity-lands-105-million-round-and-1-billion-valuation/75544526/. 
  7. Anderson, Stuart. "Sebastian Thrun: Udacity Would Not Exist Without Immigrants" (in en). https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/03/14/sebastian-thrun-udacity-would-not-exist-without-immigrants/. 
  8. Poletti, Therese. "Why the father of the self-driving car left Google" (in en-US). MarketWatch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-father-of-the-self-driving-car-left-google-2016-09-02. 
  9. Davis, Joshua. "Say Hello to Stanley" (in en-US). WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2006/01/stanley/. Retrieved 2018-03-04. 
  10. 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.
  11. "Leadership of Top Radiology Practice I Nines Teleradiology". https://www.nines.com/our-team. 
  12. "Nines FDA Approval". https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200430005518/en/Nines-Receives-Unprecedented-FDA-Approval-Enabling-Democratized-Access-To-AI-Enabled-Radiology-In-The-Telehealth-Era. 
  13. "Nines 510(k)". https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf19/K193351.pdf. 
  14. "David Stavens - Google Scholar Citations". https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W7JK4scAAAAJ&hl=en. 
  15. "Princeton Entrepreneurs". https://entrepreneurs.princeton.edu/people/david-stavens-02. 
  16. "David Stavens' Homepage". https://ai.stanford.edu/~dstavens/. 
  17. "Masters Alumni Stanford Computer Science" (in en). https://legacy.cs.stanford.edu/directory/masters-alumni. 
  18. "Ph.D Alumni Stanford Computer Science" (in en). https://legacy.cs.stanford.edu/directory/phd-alumni. 
  19. "David Stavens - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=156869. 
  20. Poletti, Therese. "Why the father of the self-driving car left Google" (in en-US). MarketWatch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-father-of-the-self-driving-car-left-google-2016-09-02. 
  21. ""Stanley" Robot Car" (in en). http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1377824. 
  22. "Stanley Moves In" (in en). National Air and Space Museum. 2012-11-09. https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/stanley-moves. 
  23. Dahlkamp, H.; Kaehler, A.; Stavens, D.; Thrun, S.; Bradski, G. (2006-08-16). Self-supervised Monocular Road Detection in Desert Terrain. 02. ISBN 9780262693486. http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss02/p05.html. 
  24. 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. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3020419.3020476. 
  25. 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. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2010.5539773. ISBN 978-1-4244-6984-0. 
  26. "David Stavens, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge vision algorithms" (in en). 22 November 2009. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/sr289rj9766. 
  27. "What we're driving at" (in en). https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html. 
  28. Ghosh, Shona (2013-03-09). "Google Glass: the scientists behind Google's augmented reality glasses" (in en-GB). The Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9918794/Google-Glass-the-scientists-behind-Googles-augmented-reality-glasses.html. 
  29. "Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Winners | Qualcomm" (in en). Qualcomm. https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/winners. 
  30. 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. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979643. ISBN 978-1-61284-386-5. 
  31. "Indoor location is ready for its second act (exclusive)" (in en-US). VentureBeat. 2012-08-30. https://venturebeat.com/2012/08/30/indoor-location-is-ready-for-its-second-act-exclusive/. 
  32. "Apple Buys Indoor Mapping Company WifiSLAM". Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-indoor-mapping-company-wifislam-2013-3. 
  33. Cheshire, Tom. "University just got flipped: how online video is opening up knowledge to the world". Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/university-just-got-flipped. 
  34. "Udacity Official Declares MOOCs 'Dead' (Though the Company Still Offers Them) - EdSurge News" (in en-US). EdSurge. 2017-10-12. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-12-udacity-official-declares-moocs-dead-though-the-company-still-offers-them. 
  35. "Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course" (in en-US). Fast Company. 2013-11-14. https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. 
  36. Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12). "Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online" (in en-US). Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303299604577326302609615094. 
  37. "Udacity Raises $105 Million Series D, Bringing Valuation To $1 Billion – TechCrunch" (in en-US). 11 November 2015. https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/11/udacity-raises-105-million-series-d-bringing-valuation-to-1-billion/. 
  38. "Udacity, with eye to eventual IPO, says revenue more than doubled...". Reuters. 2018-02-27. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-udacity-revenue/udacity-with-eye-to-eventual-ipo-says-revenue-more-than-doubled-in-2017-idUSKCN1GB2E2. 

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