Driverless car pioneer and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun will share his knowledge in this 7 week interactive online course. Thrun is not only the first winner of Darpa ‘s 2005 Grand Challenge competition for autonomous vehicles. He is also employed by Google where he leads their mostly secret Google cars project.
This will be a serious course, with a university-level work load, assignments and exams. Last fall Thrun and Peter Norvig taught their joint introductory class on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in two versions: One version to their Stanford students and an online version with exactly the same content to approximately 160000 students from 190 countries. More than 23000 students completed the course!
After this experience Thrun co-founded Udacity, a company that believes that “university-level education can be both high quality and low cost”. Through this venture Thrun simultaneously advances education and the adoption of autonomous cars. This course will excite thousands of students for this topic, advance the mind-share for autonomous cars and may even send future employees towards the Google robocars team.
The course CS373 is free, has few requirements – knowledge of the Python programming language would be helpful – and starts on February 20.