Jeff Dean

{{short description|American computer scientist and software engineer}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Jeff Dean

| image = Jeff Dean at Purdue Engineering (May 2024) - img 02.jpg

| image_size =

| caption = Dean in 2024

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|year=1968|month=7|day=23}}

| birth_place = Hawaii

| nationality = American

| field = Computer science

| work_institution = Google, Digital Equipment Corporation

| alma_mater = University of Minnesota, B.S. Computer Science and Engineering (1990)
University of Washington, Ph.D. Computer Science (1996)

| doctoral_advisor = Craig Chambers

| thesis_title = Whole-program optimization of object-oriented languages

| thesis_year = 1996

| thesis_url = ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/chambers/jdean-thesis.ps.gz

| known_for = MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TensorFlow

}}

Jeffrey Adgate Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI.{{Cite web |last=Vincent |first=James |date=2018-04-03 |title=Google veteran Jeff Dean takes over as company's AI chief |url=https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17191944/google-ai-head-jeff-dean-reshuffle-john-giannandrea |access-date=2023-11-29 |website=The Verge |language=en}} He was appointed Google's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into Google DeepMind.{{Cite web |last=Elias |first=Jennifer |date=2023-04-20 |title=Read the internal memo Alphabet sent in merging A.I.-focused groups DeepMind and Google Brain |url=https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/20/alphabet-merges-ai-focused-groups-deepmind-and-google-research.html |access-date=2023-06-22 |website=CNBC |language=en}}

Education

Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in computer science and economics in 1990.{{Cite web|url=https://research.google/people/jeff/|title=Jeff Dean }} His undergraduate thesis was on neural networks in C programming, advised by Vipin Kumar.{{cite thesis |last=Dean |first=Jeffrey |url=https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1fs4sczbCaACzA9XwxR3DiuXVtqmejL/view |title=Parallel implementations of neural network training: Two back-propagation approaches |publisher=University of Minnesota |year=1990}}{{cite tweet |user=jeffdean |number=1033874204548984833 |title=[...] Kudos to University of Minnesota (@UMNews) Honors Program. Earlier this year, I asked Prof. Vipin Kumar, my advisor for this work, if he still had a copy, since I had lost my copy. He didn't, but checked with the Honors Program [...]}}

He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.{{Cite web|url=https://talks.stanford.edu/jeff-dean-tensorflow-overview-and-future-directions/|title=STANFORD TALKS; Jeff Dean: TensorFlow Overview and Future Directions|date=21 January 2016|publisher=Stanford University|access-date=15 August 2016|archive-date=August 28, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160828212700/https://talks.stanford.edu/jeff-dean-tensorflow-overview-and-future-directions/|url-status=dead}} 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".{{Cite web|url=https://news.cs.washington.edu/2009/02/05/jeff-dean-elected-to-national-academy-of-engineering/|title=Jeff Dean elected to National Academy of Engineering|date=5 February 2009|website=UW CSE News|publisher=University of Washington|access-date=15 August 2016}}
- {{Cite web|url=http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/dean_2879385.cfm|title=Jeffrey A Dean - Award Winner|publisher=Association for Computing Machinery|access-date=15 August 2018}}

Career

Before joining Google, Dean worked at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory,{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/|title=If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet |last=Metz|first=Cade|date=8 August 2008|magazine=Wired|access-date=19 August 2016}} where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture and information retrieval.{{Cite web|url=https://speakerpedia.com/speakers/jeff-dean|title=Jeff Dean|website=Speakerpedia|access-date=19 August 2016}} Much of his work was completed in close collaboration with Sanjay Ghemawat.{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/|title=If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet |last=Metz|first=Cade |date=2012-08-08|magazine=Wired|access-date=2017-12-16|language=en-US}}{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge|title=The Friendship That Made Google Huge|magazine=The New Yorker|access-date=2018-12-03}}

Before 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.

Dean joined Google in mid-1999. He joined Google X in 2011 to investigate deep neural networks, which had just resurged in popularity. This ended with "the cat neuron paper", a deep belief network trained by unsupervised learning on YouTube videos. This project morphed into Google Brain, also formed in 2011. Jeff Dean became its leader in 2012. In April 2018, he was appointed the head of Google's artificial intelligence division, after John Giannandrea left to lead Apple's AI projects.{{Cite magazine |last=Simonite |first=Tom |title=Google's New AI Head Is So Smart He Doesn't Need AI |url=https://www.wired.com/story/googles-new-ai-head-is-so-smart-he-doesnt-need-ai/ |access-date=2024-11-29 |magazine=Wired |language=en-US |issn=1059-1028}}

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 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, an open-source data interchange format.
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
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".{{Cite book |last=Le |first=Quoc V. |chapter=Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning |date=May 2013 |pages=8595–8598 |title=2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing |chapter-url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/icassp.2013.6639343 |publisher=IEEE |doi=10.1109/icassp.2013.6639343|arxiv=1112.6209 |isbn=978-1-4799-0356-6 }}{{Cite news |last=Markoff |first=John |date=June 25, 2012 |title=How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html |work=The New York Times}}
TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library. He was the primary designer and implementor of the initial system.{{Cite web |title=Jeffrey Dean |url=https://research.google/people/jeff/?type=google |access-date=2024-10-25 |website=Google Research |language=en}}
Pathways, an asynchronous distributed dataflow system for neural networks. It was used in PaLM.

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.{{Cite news|url=https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/02/google-exec-john-giannandrea-steps-down-jeff-dean-takes-over-ai.html|title=Google is splitting A.I. into its own business unit and shaking up its search leadership|last=D'Onfro|first=Jillian|date=2018-04-02|work=CNBC|access-date=2018-04-03}}

In 2023, DeepMind was merged with Google Brain to form a unified AI research unit, Google DeepMind. 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, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University to support programs that promote diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).{{Cite news|url=https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/diversity/hopper-dean|title=$1M Hopper-Dean Foundation Gift for Diversity in CS|publisher=UC Berkeley|access-date=29 January 2019}}
- {{Cite news|url=http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/8/10/one-of-googles-top-programmers-has-made-stem-diversity-a-phi.html|title=One of Google's Top Programmers Has Made STEM Diversity a Philanthropic Cause |website=Inside Philanthropy|last=Williams|first=Tate|date=10 August 2016|access-date=15 August 2016}}
- {{Cite news|url=http://news.mit.edu/2016/gift-will-support-diversity-in-stem-education-0801|title=$1 million gift to support diversity in STEM education|publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology|access-date=25 October 2020}}

Personal life

Dean is married and has two daughters.

He is the subject of an Internet meme for "Jeff Dean facts". Similar to Chuck Norris facts, the Jeff Dean facts exaggerate his programming powers.{{Cite web |last=Carlson |first=Nicholas |title=Astounding 'Facts' About Google's Most Badass Engineer, Jeff Dean |url=https://www.businessinsider.com/astounding-facts-about-googles-most-badass-engineer-jeff-dean-2012-1 |access-date=2024-11-30 |website=Business Insider |language=en-US}} For example:{{Citation |last=Ritzdorf |first=Lucas |title=LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts |date=2024-10-23 |url=https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts |access-date=2024-11-29}}

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 National Academy of Engineering (2009)
Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009)
ACM-Infosys Foundation Award{{cite web | title=Jeffrey A Dean | website=ACM Awards Home | url=https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/dean_2879385 }} (2012)
ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2007){{cite web|title=The Mark Weiser Award|url=https://www.sigops.org/awards/mw/|publisher=ACM SIGOPS|access-date=5 July 2019}}
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016){{citation|url=https://www.amacad.org/content/members/newFellows.aspx?s=c|title=Newly Elected Members|date=April 2016|publisher=American Academy of Arts and Sciences|access-date=2016-04-20}}
Recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal 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.{{cite book|author=Ford, Marin |date=2018 |title=Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it|publisher=Packt Publishing Ltd|isbn= 9781789131260}}

Major publications

Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. 2004. [http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html 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. [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data]. OSDI'06: 7th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (October 2006)