American computer scientist
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.
[3] 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
^ 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 .
^
David Stavens at the
Mathematics Genealogy Project . Retrieved March 4, 2018.
^
a
b
"Learning to drive [electronic resource] : perception for autonomous cars in SearchWorks catalog" . searchworks.stanford.edu . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12).
"Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online" . Wall Street Journal .
ISSN
0099-9660 . Retrieved 2018-04-04 .
^ Leckart, Steven.
"The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever" . WIRED . Retrieved 2018-03-14 .
^
"Online pioneer Udacity lands $105 million round and a $1 billion valuation" . USA TODAY . Retrieved 2021-07-08 .
^ Anderson, Stuart.
"Sebastian Thrun: Udacity Would Not Exist Without Immigrants" . Forbes . Retrieved 2021-07-08 .
^ Poletti, Therese.
"Why the father of the self-driving car left Google" . MarketWatch . Retrieved 2021-07-08 .
^ Davis, Joshua.
"Say Hello to Stanley" . WIRED . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ 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 .
^
"Leadership of Top Radiology Practice I Nines Teleradiology" . www.nines.com . Archived from
the original on 2021-07-09. Retrieved 2021-07-08 .
^
"Nines FDA Approval" . www.businesswire.com . Retrieved 2024-01-08 .
^
"Nines 510(k)" (PDF) . www.fda.gov . Retrieved 2024-01-08 .
^
"David Stavens - Google Scholar Citations" . scholar.google.com . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^
"Princeton Entrepreneurs" . entrepreneurs.princeton.edu . Retrieved 2023-11-09 .
^
"David Stavens' Homepage" . ai.stanford.edu . Retrieved 2018-04-03 .
^
"Masters Alumni Stanford Computer Science" . cs.stanford.edu . Retrieved 2024-01-10 .
^
"Ph.D Alumni Stanford Computer Science" . cs.stanford.edu . Retrieved 2024-01-08 .
^
"David Stavens - The Mathematics Genealogy Project" . www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ Poletti, Therese.
"Why the father of the self-driving car left Google" . MarketWatch . Retrieved 2018-03-16 .
^
" "Stanley" Robot Car" . National Museum of American History . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^
"Stanley Moves In" . National Air and Space Museum . 2012-11-09. Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ 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 .
^ 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 .
^ 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 .
^
"David Stavens, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge vision algorithms" . searchworks.stanford.edu . 22 November 2009.
^
"What we're driving at" . Official Google Blog . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ 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 .
^
"Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Winners | Qualcomm" . Qualcomm . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ 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 .
^
"Indoor location is ready for its second act (exclusive)" . VentureBeat . 2012-08-30. Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^
"Apple Buys Indoor Mapping Company WifiSLAM" . Business Insider . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^ Cheshire, Tom.
"University just got flipped: how online video is opening up knowledge to the world" . Wired Magazine . Retrieved 2018-04-04 .
^
"Udacity Official Declares MOOCs 'Dead' (Though the Company Still Offers Them) - EdSurge News" . EdSurge . 2017-10-12. Retrieved 2018-03-16 .
^
"Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course" . Fast Company . 2013-11-14. Retrieved 2018-03-16 .
^ Efrati, Amir (2012-04-12).
"Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online" . Wall Street Journal .
ISSN
0099-9660 . Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
^
"Udacity Raises $105 Million Series D, Bringing Valuation To $1 Billion – TechCrunch" . techcrunch.com . 11 November 2015. Retrieved 2018-03-16 .
^
"Udacity, with eye to eventual IPO, says revenue more than doubled..." Reuters . 2018-02-27. Retrieved 2018-03-04 .
External links