David Stavens

As CEO, he grew the company to 160,000 students and 20 employees. Udacity was valued at $1 billion in 2015. As of 2018, Udacity had over 50,000 paid students and $70 million in revenue.

Stavens also made contributions to the 2009 NASA Mars Rover Mission.

Stavens also 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.

Stavens was a co-creator on Stanford’s autonomous car team. 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 and National Air and Space Museum. 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. Stavens's publications state that they apply the concept of self-supervised learning to autonomous driving with the benefit of avoiding human intervention. His dissertation states that this self-supervised learning approach has the potential to improve human driving performance. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab awarded Stavens a gold medal "For his groundbreaking contributions to the winning DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle...."