Thrun was born in 1967 in Solingen, Germany, the son of Winfried and Kristin Thrun. He completed his Vordiplom in computer science, economics, and medicine at the University of Hildesheim in 1988. At the University of Bonn, he completed a Diplom in 1993 and a Ph.D. in 1995 in computer science and statistics.
Career and research
In 1995 he joined the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University as a research computer scientist. In 1998 he became an assistant professor and co-director of the Robot Learning Laboratory at CMU. As a faculty member at CMU, he co-founded the Master's Program in Automated Learning and Discovery, which later would become a Ph.D. program in the broad area of machine learning and scientific discovery. In 2001 Thrun spent a sabbatical year at Stanford University. He returned to CMU to an endowed professorship, the Finmeccanica Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics. Thrun left CMU in July 2003 to become an associate professor at Stanford University and was appointed as the director of SAIL in January 2004. From 2007–2011, Thrun was a full professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. On April 1, 2011, Thrun relinquished his tenure at Stanford to join Google as a Google Fellow. On January 23, 2012, he co-founded an online private educational organization, Udacity. He was a Google VP and Fellow, and worked on development of the Google driverless car system. Thrun was interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?.
Robotics
Thrun developed a number of autonomous robotic systems that earned him international recognition. In 1994, he started the University of Bonn's Rhino project together with his doctoral thesis advisor Armin B. Cremers. In 1997 Thrun and his colleagues Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox developed the world's first robotic tour guide in the Deutsches Museum Bonn. In 1998, the follow-up robot "Minerva" was installed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, where it guided tens of thousands of visitors during a two-week deployment period. Thrun went on to found the CMU/Pitt Nursebot project, which fielded an interactive humanoid robot in a nursing home near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002, Thrun helped develop mine mapping robots in a project with his colleagues William L. Whittaker and Scott Thayer, research professors at Carnegie Mellon University. After his move to Stanford University in 2003, he engaged in the development of the robot Stanley, which in 2005 won the DARPA Grand Challenge. His former graduate student Michael Montemerlo, who was co-advised by William L. Whittaker, led the software development for this robot. In 2007, Thrun's robot "Junior" won second place in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Thrun joined Google as part of a sabbatical, together with several Stanford students. At Google, he co-developed Google Street View. Thrun's best known contributions to robotics are on the theoretical end. He contributed to the area of probabilistic robotics, a field that marries statistics and robotics. He and his research group made substantial contributions in areas of mobile robot localization, mapping, and control. Probabilistic techniques have since become mainstream in robotics, and are used in numerous commercial applications. In the fall of 2005, Thrun published a textbook entitled Probabilistic Robotics together with his long-term co-workers Dieter Fox and Wolfram Burgard. Since 2007, a Japanese translation of Probabilistic Robotics has been available on the Japanese market. Thrun is one of the principal investors of the Stanford spin-off VectorMagic.
Awards
Named one of Brilliant 5 by Popular Science in 2005
