Sebastian Thrun

Educator, entrepreneur
Sebastian Thrun is a passionate technologist who is constantly looking for new opportunities to make the world better for all of us.

Why you should listen

Sebastian Thrun is an educator, entrepreneur and troublemaker. After a long life as a professor at Stanford University, Thrun resigned from tenure to join Google. At Google, he founded Google X, home to self-driving cars and many other moonshot technologies. Thrun also founded Udacity, an online university with worldwide reach, and Kitty Hawk, a "flying car" company. He has authored 11 books, 400 papers, holds 3 doctorates and has won numerous awards.

Sebastian Thrun’s TED talks

More news and ideas from Sebastian Thrun

Live from TED2017

The real news: In-depth conversations in a special session at TED2017

April 27, 2017

So much of our lives are gut reactions; they drive our newsfeeds, and they make our minds smaller. At TED2017, we decided to step back from the frenzy of the news media cycle to take an in-depth and nuanced look at three topics of particular interest — the forward march of machine learning with Sebastian […]

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In Brief

How small lies turn into big lies, what everyday objects tell us about inequality, and robots that lend a helping hand during disasters

November 4, 2016

Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week: The cascading effect of small lies. Tali Sharot is the senior author on a paper published in Nature Neuroscience that sheds light on the possible slippery-slope effect of telling small, self-serving lies. Using an fMRI scanning device to monitor the […]

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Ideas

Two giants of online learning discuss the future of education

January 28, 2014

Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently […]

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