Have you driven the freeways around the Bay Area lately, wondering how we will ever get out of this mess? Commute traffic continues to worsen. Car pooling and HOV lanes have not worked. Light rail has not worked. BART is expanding but has limited coverage. What hope is there?
Dr. Stefan Heck, co-Founder & CEO of Nauto, a Palo Alto-based autonomous vehicle software company, will kick off a new series on the Future of Transportation in the Bay Area, produced by the MIT Club of Northern California’s Energy & Environment team.
Dr. Heck, a true visionary and a dynamic speaker, believes that a convergence of innovative new technologies, consisting of autonomous driving, vehicle sharing, connectedness and rapid growth of electric vehicles will create a revolution in how today’s current single car drivers will view their transportation options in the near future and that, although implementation will sometimes be challenging, there is room for cautious optimism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Stefan Heck is CEO and co-Founder of Nauto, a Palo Alto-based autonomous vehicle technology company. Nauto connects fleet managers, insurers, commercial vehicles and drivers through a deep learning platform that makes roads safer and helps businesses run more effectively. At Nauto’s core is a perpetually learning artificial intelligence system and network which learns from drivers and events in real time, allowing drivers to stay one step ahead and gain a precise, comprehensive view of driving activity and behavior.
Until recently, he was Consulting Professor at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, teaching courses and conducting research on innovation, energy and resource economics.
Previously he was a Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-founded and led their Cleantech and Sustainability practice, working with many large companies globally. He is on the Board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and is an angel investor in disruptive technology companies.
He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from UCSD and a BS with honors in symbolic systems from Stanford University, focusing his research on deep learning.
