Sebastian Thrun On How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Detect Skin Cancer

Self-driving technology pioneer Sebastian Thrun is now working on AI for preventive detection of skin cancer.

Nishant Sharma @nishantstv

26 Feb 2019, 02:59 PM IST

Sebastian Thrun, chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corp., speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in U.S. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

From autonomous vehicles, flying cars and online education, Sebastian Thrun is now working on application of artificial intelligence in preventive medicine.

“A lot of diseases that kill people are preventable if we have AI systems that can do proper screening,” Thrun said in an interview to BloombergQuint. “We proved to ourselves that we were able to find skin cancer more accurately that even the best human dermatologists couldn’t,” he said. “There is a great opportunity in health tech.”

A Stanford University research, led by Thrun, 51, is creating an AI application that can help detect skin cancer.

Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, is the founder of online education start-up Udacity, CEO of KittyHawk, a startup that makes flying vehicle, and is also chairman of Cresta AI that automates sales jobs.

In India, Udacity has so far seen 13,000 students graduate with about 36,000 enrolled for its courses. The education platform provides courses on flying cars, artificial intelligence and data analytics, among others.

Watch the full interaction here: