AI pioneer, Sebastian Thrun, who has spearheaded self-driving car research has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity — an online educational venture, with David Evans. Udacity’s first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. Thrun was recently profiled in our post, "What Will Self-Driving Cars Mean For Us?"
As Thrun explains on his homepage:
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” to the world online, free of charge.
We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI than all AI professors in the world combined.
This one class had more educational impact than my entire career. Just watch this video (shown below — Ed.). Now that I saw the true power of education, there is no turning back. It’s like a drug. I won’t be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.
The Udacity website is already open for signups and the first two course are due to start next month.
That's actually great for Thrun. He is really bright on his field and I'm pretty sure he'll succeed on this new endeavor of his. He is basically the best on the field.
ReplyDelete