The luckiest guy in AI (Ep. 477)

Serial entrepreneur Varun Ganapathi joins the home team for a conversation about the intersection of physics, machine learning, and AI. He offers some recommendations for developers looking to get started in the ML/AI space and shares his own path from academia to entrepreneurship. Plus: How an early lack of Nintendo motivated Varun to learn to program.

Episode notes:

Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA, which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry.

Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here. His instructor? Andrew Ng.

Along with NG, Varun was lucky enough to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like Jeffrey Dean, Head of Google AI; Daphne Koller, cofounder of Coursera; and Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of Udacity.

When Varun earned his PhD in computer science and AI, Koller and Thrun served as his advisors. You can read their work here.

In 2017, Udacity acquired Varun’s startup, CloudLabs, the company behind Terminal.  

Connect with Varun on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user John Woo for their answer to the question Update the row that has the current highest (maximum) value of one field.

TRANSCRIPT