Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean (born 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Google Senior Fellow in the Systems and Infrastructure Group.

Personal life and education

Dean received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, working with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented languages.[1] He received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990.[2] 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."[3][4]

Career in computer science

Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory,[5] where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval.[6]

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.[6]

Career at Google

Dean joined Google in mid-1999, and is currently a Google Senior Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google, he has 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 sits underneath most of Google's products. 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.

Among others, the projects he's 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.
  • MapReduce, a system for large-scale data processing applications.
  • Google Brain, a system for large-scale artificial neural networks.
  • LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key-value store.
  • TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library.

Philanthropy

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 to MIT to support programs that promote diversity in STEM.[7]

Awards and honors

Major publications

See also

References

  1. ^ "STANFORD TALKS; Jeff Dean: TensorFlow Overview and Future Directions". Stanford University. 21 January 2016. Retrieved 15 August 2016. 
  2. ^ "CS&E Alumnus Jeff Dean Elected to Academy of Arts & Sciences". University of Minnesota. 25 April 2016. Retrieved 15 August 2016. 
  3. ^ "UW CSE News; Jeff Dean elected to National Academy of Engineering". University of Washington. 5 February 2009. Retrieved 15 August 2016. 
  4. ^ "Jeffrey A Dean - Award Winner". Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 15 August 2016. 
  5. ^ Metz, Cade (8 August 2008). "If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet | WIRED". WIRED. Retrieved 19 August 2016. 
  6. ^ a b "Jeff Dean - Speakerpedia, Discover & Follow a World of Compelling Voices". Speakerpedia. Retrieved 19 August 2016. 
  7. ^ Williams, Tate (10 August 2016). "One of Google's Top Programmers Has Made STEM Diversity a Philanthropic Cause - Inside Philanthropy". Retrieved 15 August 2016. 
  8. ^ Newly Elected Members, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 2016, retrieved 2016-04-20 

External links