Jeff Dean

Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990.[2] He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[3] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages in 1996.[4] He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, which recognized his work on "the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems."[5][6]

Before joining Google, Dean worked at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory,[7] where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval.[8] Much of his work was completed in close collaboration with Sanjay Ghemawat.[9][3]

Prior to graduate school, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.[8]

Dean joined Google in mid-1999, and is currently the head of its Artificial Intelligence division. While at Google, he designed and implemented large portions of the company's advertising, crawling, indexing and query serving systems, along with various pieces of the distributed computing infrastructure that underlies most of Google's products.[3] At various times, he has also worked on improving search quality, statistical machine translation, and various internal software development tools and has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process.

The projects Dean has worked on include:

• Spanner, a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database
• Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate
• BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system[3]
• MapReduce, a system for large-scale data processing applications[3]
• LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key-value store
• DistBelief, a proprietary machine-learning system for deep neural networks that was eventually refactored into TensorFlow
• TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library[3]

He was an early member of Google Brain,[3] a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks, and he has headed Artificial Intelligence efforts since they were split from Google Search.[10]

Dean was the subject of controversy when ethics in AI researcher Timnit Gebru challenged Google's research review process, ultimately leading to her departure from the company. Dean responded by publishing a letter on Google's approach to the research process[11] that was the subject of further criticism and controversy.[12]

Dean and his wife, Heidi Hopper, started the Hopper-Dean Foundation and began making philanthropic grants in 2011. In 2016, the foundation gave $1 million each to UC Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to support programs that promote diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).[13][14][15]

Dean is married and has two daughters.[3]

• Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2009)
• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009)
• ACM-Infosys Foundation Award[16] (2012)
• ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2012)[17]
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016)[18]

He is widely credited within the Google corporation and in the general field of Computer Science for his numerous contributions to the field.

Dean was interviewed for the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.[19]

• Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. 2004. MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. OSDI'04: Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (December 2004)
• Fay Chang, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Wilson C. Hsieh, Deborah A. Wallach, Mike Burrows, Tushar Chandra, Andrew Fikes, and Robert E. Gruber. 2006. Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data. OSDI'06: 7th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (October 2006)

• Sanjay Ghemawat
• MapReduce
• TensorFlow

• Jeff Dean's Google home and publication page