Kurt Dresner
Partner, Analyst
Kurt graduated with distinction and honors in both mathematics and computer science from Harvey Mudd in 2002. In the summers of 2000 and 2001, while at Harvey Mudd College, Kurt participated in research funded by the National Science Foundation to find optimal virtual topologies for optical networks. The network topologies maximized the information dispersal speed. In addition to proving theoretical results, he used techniques such as dynamic programming to produce implementations of algorithms for this problem.
Kurt went on to the doctoral program in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, Kurt joined the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he founded his own research project, Autonomous Intersection Management, or AIM. The AIM project proposes a radical new method for controlling intersections of fully autonomous (driverless) vehicles that is orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional traffic lights and stop signs. With both the AIM project and other projects at UT Austin, Kurt has published several papers and articles in top tier conferences and journals. In addition to working on challenging problems, Kurt enjoys teaching. As an assistant instructor, he proposed, designed, and taught the university's first course on the Ruby programming language. The fifteen students in Kurt's class rated him on an integer scale between 1 and 5. Kurt received an average teaching evaluation of 4.9.
He is expected to complete his dissertation in the Fall of 2008.