The luckiest guy in AI

<p>Varun is the cofounder and CTO of <a href="https://akasa.com/">AKASA</a>, which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-QUkgk3HyE&ab_channel=Stanford">here</a>. His instructor? Andrew Ng.</p><p>Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like <a href="https://research.google/people/jeff/">Jeffrey Dean</a>, Head of Google AI; <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/daphne-koller-4053a820/">Daphne Koller</a>, cofounder of Coursera; and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-thrun-59a0b273/">Sebastian Thrun</a>, cofounder of Udacity.</p><p>When Varun earned his PhD in computer science and AI, Koller and Thrun served as his advisors. You can read their work <a href="https://ai.stanford.edu/~varung/ganapathi12eccv.pdf">here</a>.</p><p>In 2017, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/01/udacity-buys-cloudlabs-in-its-first-ever-acquisition-to-enable-collaborative-programming/">Udacity acquired Varun’s startup, CloudLabs</a>, the company behind <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/terminal/?_ga=2.14089015.187291007.1661448024-731762442.1659385801">Terminal</a>.  </p><p>Connect with Varun on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/varungp/">LinkedIn</a>.</p><p>Today’s <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/8842/lifeboat">Lifeboat badge</a> goes to user <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/491243/john-woo">John Woo</a> for their answer to the question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12242466/update-the-row-that-has-the-current-highest-maximum-value-of-one-field">Update the row that has the current highest (maximum) value of one field</a>.</p>