Sebastian Thrun
Sebastian Thrun, the robotics engineer behind Self-Driving cars, is known as one of the most influential computer scientists in the world. One of the initial founders of Google X, Thrun is also a Google VP, a research professor at Stanford University, and the founder and CEO of Udacity, a democratically based online collaborative education website, also known as a Mooc (24, 31). Studying computer science, economics, and medicine at the University of Hildesheim, Thrun has gone onto receive his PhD and was rated number four on Foreign Policy’s magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers (50). With the motto “Build it. Break it. Improve it,” Thrun has helped to lead teams that create remarkable things such as Google’s driverless cars and even Google Glass (15).
The Google Empire 