Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

. Since 2018, he is the lead of

Google AI Google AI is a division of Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. It was announced at Google I/O 2017 by CEO Sundar Pichai. Projects * Serving cloud-based TPUs (tensor processing units) in order to develop machine learning software. * De ...

, Google's AI division.

Education

Dean received a B.S., ''summa cum laude'', from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and economics in 1990. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

in 1996, working under

Craig Chambers Craig Chambers has been a computer scientist at Google since 2007. Prior to this, he was a Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from MIT i ...

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

s and whole-program optimization techniques for

object-oriented programming languages Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

. He was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 2009, which recognized his work on "the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems".

Career

Before joining

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, Dean worked at DEC/

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture and information retrieval. Much of his work was completed in close collaboration with Sanjay Ghemawat. Before graduate school, he worked at the

World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of h ...

's Global Programme on

AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...

, developing software for

statistical model A statistical model is a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of Sample (statistics), sample data (and similar data from a larger Statistical population, population). A statistical model repres ...

ing and forecasting of the

HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of ''Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immune ...

pandemic A pandemic () is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic (epidemiology), endemic disease wi ...

. Dean joined Google in mid-1999, and is currently the head of its

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

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. At various times, he has also worked on improving search quality,

statistical machine translation Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contras ...

and internal software development tools and has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process. The projects Dean has worked on include: *

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as nuts and bolts—or keep them from turning. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zeala ...

, a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database * Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for ''

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API t ...

'' *

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Googl ...

, a large-scale semi-structured storage system *

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

, a system for large-scale data processing applications *

LevelDB LevelDB is an open-source on-disk key-value store written by Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. Inspired by Bigtable, LevelDB is hosted on GitHub under the New BSD License and has been ported to a variety of Unix-based systems, ma ...

, 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 TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...

, an open-source machine-learning software library He was an early member of

Google Brain Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combines open-ended machine learning research ...

, a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks, and he has headed artificial intelligence efforts since they were split from Google Search. Dean was the subject of controversy when the ethics in AI researcher,

Timnit Gebru Timnit Gebru ( am, ትምኒት ገብሩ; born 1983/1984) is an American computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black resea ...

, 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 that was the subject of further criticism and controversy.

Philanthropy

Dean and his wife, Heidi Hopper, started the Hopper-Dean Foundation and began making philanthropic grants in 2011. In 2016, the foundation gave $2 million each to

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

to support programs that promote diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (

STEM Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...

Personal life

Dean is married and has two daughters.

Awards and honors

* Elected to the

(2009) * Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

(2009) * ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2012) * ACM

SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award The ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) Mark Weiser Award is awarded to an individual who has shown creativity and innovation in operating system research. The recipients began their career no earlier than 20 years prior to nom ...

(2007) * Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Olive