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Faculty Startup
Sebastian Thrun and Alex Aiken: Promising investments
The founders of Yahoo! know very well how a small initial investment, combined
with first-rate engineering talent, can produce tremendous returns. With this
principle in mind, they created the David Filo and Jerry Yang Faculty Chairs to
jump-start brilliant young minds in computer science at Stanford. Two appointments, made in 2004, were to Sebastian Thrun and Alex Aiken.
Sebastian Thrun is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, working primarily in artificial intelligence, robotics, and
machine learning. He is a recognized pioneer in the area of probabilistic robots,
focusing on mobile robot exploration, mapping, and multi-robot coordination. He led the team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and came in second at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, each a contest among fully autonomous robotic cars. Other robots
designed by Thrun and his students have been used in museums as tour guides, in
elderly care facilities as personal assistants and walking aids, and in abandoned
mines as tools for acquiring mine maps.
Alex Aiken is a professor of computer
science whose research focuses on developing techniques for the construction of
reliable software systems. His interests include both static and dynamic methods
of analyzing problems, from detecting errors in software to verifying their absence.
His research extends to the design of new programming languages and techniques
that facilitate error management in writing software.
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The Stanford Challenge