Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and currently serves as the lead of Google AI since 2018, and was appointed Alphabet's chief scientist in 2023. Formerly, he held positions as a Google Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Research and Google Health. He has also been a Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group and started and led Google Brain, a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks.

Dean's areas of interest include large-scale distributed systems, performance monitoring, compression techniques, information retrieval, application of machine learning to search and other related problems, microprocessor architecture, compiler optimizations, and development of new products that organize existing information in new and interesting ways.

Dean has made significant contributions to Google's technologies, as he is a co-designer of several major Google technologies, including MapReduce, Bigtable, and TensorFlow. These technical skills are underpinned by his academic background where he 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 in 1996. He also received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990. From 1996 to 1999, Dean worked for Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, where he worked on low-overhead profiling tools, design of profiling hardware for out-of-order microprocessors, and web-based information retrieval. From 1990 to 1991, Dean worked for the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software to do statistical modeling, forecasting, and analysis of the HIV pandemic.

Dean's contribution to the field of computing and AI has been recognized with numerous awards and memberships. In 2009, Dean was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was also named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His other accolades include the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in 2012, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2007, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2021. He was also awarded a Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. Additionally, Dean has contributed to diversity in STEM through philanthropy, including a $1M donation from the Hopper-Dean Foundation to UC Berkeley and MIT for diversity in computer science.

Dean has also been active in public speaking and authorship, having co-authored significant publications like "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" and "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data". He was interviewed for the 2018 book "Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it" by Martin Ford. Notably, Dean gave a TED Talk titled "Jeff Dean: AI isn't as smart as you think -- but it could be" in August 2021, where he discussed the potential and limitations of artificial intelligence, focusing on its application in understanding language and diagnosing disease. He also presented a roadmap for building better and more responsible AI systems. The talk included a Q&A session with Chris Anderson, the head of TED.