Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean
Born	1968 (age 55–56)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Washington, Ph.D. Computer Science (1996) University of Minnesota B.S. Computer Science and Economics (1990);
Known for	MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner
Scientific career
Fields	Computer Technology
Institutions	Google; Digital Equipment Corporation
Thesis	Whole-program optimization of object-oriented languages (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Craig Chambers

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. He received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990. 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."

Career in computer science

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

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.

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.

Awards and honors

• Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2009)
• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009)
• ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2012)
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016)

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)

See also

• Big Table
• MapReduce
• Spanner

External links

• Jeff Dean's Google home page.
• Meet Google's Baddest Engineer, Jeff Dean
• The Optimizer