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 ( ...

and software engineer. Since 2018, he is the lead of Google AI, 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 practical disciplines (includin ...

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 Seat ...

in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on

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 ...

. 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 of ...

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 corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, 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 Sanjay Ghemawat (born 1966 in West Lafayette, Indiana) is an Indian American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close ...

. 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 o ...

's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for

statistical model A statistical model is a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of sample data (and similar data from a larger population). A statistical model represents, often in considerably idealized form, ...

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 immu ...

/ AIDS

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 disease with a stable number of i ...

. 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 machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

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 contrast ...

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 Zealan ...

, 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 A ...

'' * Bigtable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system * MapReduce, a system for large-scale data processing applications * 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 He was an early member of Google Brain, 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, 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 university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

, Stanford University 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 mushr ...

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 (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 Oliver, ...

(2016)

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 Artificial intelligence researchers University of Washington College of Engineering alumni University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni 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