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

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI. He was appointed

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

's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind and

Google Brain Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence ...

into

Google DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Goo ...

Education

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

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

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

and economics in 1990. His undergraduate thesis was on neural networks in C programming, advised by Vipin Kumar. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on

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

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''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impleme ...

. He was elected to the

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

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

Career

Before joining

, Dean worked at DEC/

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

'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 list of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations which coordinates responses to international public health issues and emergencies. It is headquartered in Gen ...

's Global Programme on

AIDS The HIV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a Preventive healthcare, pr ...

, 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 repre ...

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 im ...

pandemic A pandemic ( ) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic (epi ...

. Dean joined Google in mid-1999. He joined Google X in 2011 to investigate

deep neural networks Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

, which had just resurged in popularity. This ended with "the cat neuron paper", a deep belief network trained by

unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a framework in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. Other frameworks in the spectrum of supervisions include weak- or semi-supervision, wh ...

on YouTube videos. This project morphed into

, also formed in 2011. Jeff Dean became its leader in 2012. In April 2018, he was appointed the head of Google's

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

division, after

John Giannandrea John Giannandrea is a British software engineer and businessman. Career He co-founded Metaweb, led Google Search and artificial intelligence, was co-founder and CTO of the speech recognition company Tellme Networks, Chief Technologist of the ...

left to lead Apple's AI projects. 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 approach where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contra ...

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

Protocol Buffers Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs that communicate with each other over a network or for storing data. The method involves an ...

, an open-source data interchange format. *

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 Nut (hardware), nuts and screw, bolts—or keep them from turning. In the United Kingdom, UK, ...

, 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 multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...

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 Goo ...

, 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 and distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filte ...

, a system for large-scale data processing applications * LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key-value store * DistBelief, a proprietary machine-learning system for distributed training of deep neural networks. The "Belief" part is because it could be used to train deep belief networks. It was eventually refactored into TensorFlow. It was used to train the network in "the cat neuron paper". *

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a Library (computing), software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks, but is used mainly for Types of artificial neural networks#Training, training and Statistical infer ...

, an open-source machine-learning software library. He was the primary designer and implementor of the initial system. * Pathways, an asynchronous distributed dataflow system for neural networks. It was used in

PaLM Palm most commonly refers to: * Palm of the hand, the central region of the front of the hand * Palm plants, of family Arecaceae ** List of Arecaceae genera **Palm oil * Several other plants known as "palm" Palm or Palms may also refer to: Music ...

. He was an early member of

, a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks, and he has headed artificial intelligence efforts since they were split from Google Search. In 2023, DeepMind was merged with

to form a unified AI research unit,

. As part of this reorganization, Dean became Google's chief scientist.

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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

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

STEM Stem or STEM most commonly refers to: * Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant * Stem group * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Stem or STEM can also refer to: Language and writing * Word stem, part of a word respon ...

Personal life

Dean is married and has two daughters. He is the subject of an

Internet meme An Internet meme, or meme (, Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''MEEM''), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that spreads across the Internet, primarily through Social media, social media platforms. Internet memes manif ...

for "Jeff Dean facts". Similar to Chuck Norris facts, the Jeff Dean facts exaggerate his programming powers. For example:

Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points.

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 membe ...

(2009) * ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2012) * ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2007) * Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) 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 Oliver, and other ...

(2016) * Recipient of the

IEEE John von Neumann Medal The IEEE John von Neumann Medal was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or ...

in 2021

Books

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.

Major publications

* 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)

References

External links

Jeff Dean's Google home and publication page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dean, Jeff Living people American computer scientists American artificial intelligence researchers University of Washington College of Engineering alumni University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni 2009 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Digital Equipment Corporation people Google employees Google Fellows 1968 births Place of birth missing (living people) Recipients of the ACM Prize in Computing Open source advocates