Sebastian Thrun | Source | Chairman and co-founder at Udacity

Sebastian Thrun is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator, and a computer scientist.
He is the co-founder and chairman of Udacity, CEO of the Kitty Hawk Corporation, and a board member of Cresta.ai
Formally a fully tenured professor at Stanford, Sebastian left in 2007 to become a Vice-President and Fellow at Google. He founded Google X, Google’s hardware innovation shop, to create a factory for moonshots. It generated Google self-driving cars, Google Glass, the Loon project, medical contact lenses, indoor localization, and it was also the original home to the Google Brain Project which leverages the best in AI and machine learning to understand the world.
Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007). Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.
Thrun is also known for his work on probabilistic algorithms for robotics with applications including robotic mapping. In recognition of his contributions, and at age 39, Thrun was elected into the National Academy of Engineering and also into the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2007. In 2011, Thrun received the Max-Planck-Research Award. and the inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize.
Fast Company selected Thrun as the fifth most creative person in the business world.
The Guardian recognized Thrun as one of 20 "fighters for internet freedom".