He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Don was the founder and CEO of four highly successful technology companies including International Cybernetics Corporation, Control Systems Research, Technology Recognition Corp. and IndustryNet. In addition, Don has provided capital and management resources for many other early stage companies that have experienced dramatic growth. Thrun pursues research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Thrun has pioneered the field of probabilistic robotics, which concerns itself with applying statistical techniques to real-world robotic problems.
Probabilistic techniques are now the method of choice in many hard robotics problems.
Thrun received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 1995. He has written one book, edited two others, and coauthored over 150 scientific articles. He also holds the position of Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Kadunc has a broad and diverse background spanning 25 years in the Acquisition Program Management arena. He has been the Program Executive overseeing the management of NASA's contribution to the National Robotics Engineering Consortium at Carnegie Mellon University.