The Lamarr Award – Honoring AI Achievements

At “AI24 – The Lamarr Conference”, we celebrated the first recipient of the Lamarr Award, Professor Dr.-mult. Sebastian Thrun, for his outstanding contributions and achievements in advancing technology and education. The researcher and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun is a pioneer in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, medical devices, self-driving cars, and digital higher education.

About our award winner: Professor Thrun completed his PhD in computer science and statistics at the University of Bonn. In 1998, he was appointed to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. In 2003, he joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). In 2009, Sebastian Thrun established the Google X research division, contributing to groundbreaking projects such as Google Glass, the Google Brain machine learning project, and autonomous vehicles. He has also founded and sold several tech companies, including Udacity, an online learning platform valued at over $1 billion, with over thirty million users in more than 160 countries, and the air cab start-up Kitty Hawk. Google Scholar ranks Thrun’s publication h-index at number 15 worldwide in all of computer science. He has been named the fifth most creative person in business by Fast Company and Global Thinker #4 by Foreign Policy. He has received numerous accolades, including the Max Planck Research Award, and holds several honorary doctorates.