Jeffrey Dean

Biography

A member of Google’s early group of employees, Jeffrey Dean has been integral to the success of the company’s powerful distributed computing capabilities and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems benefitting a wide range of applications. Dean co-led the design and implementation of five generations of Google’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, covering two to three orders of magnitude growth in number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system. He also co-led in the design and implementation of Google’s initial advertising system as well as the earliest version of the AdSense for Content product, aspects of the initial production serving system for the Google News product, and he has worked on search ranking algorithms and the first generation of the automated job scheduling system for managing clusters of machines. He also co-led in the design and implementation of protocol buffers, used extensively at Google and across the industry (through their open-sourced implementation) for almost all remote procedure call protocols for client-server communication as well as persistent storage of structured data. Dean (with colleague Sanjay Ghemawat) also co-led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary web-scale computing infrastructure, which has helped realize the potential of cloud computing. Dean then transitioned to machine learning and artificial intelligence, helping co-develop two generations of systems for the large-scale training and deployment of deep learning systems such as DistBelief and TensorFlow, which is an open-source project. These systems have demonstrated how AI can advance applications such as computer vision, speech, machine translation, and natural language processing. Dean now leads Google Research, a ~3,500 person organization dedicated to basic computer science and AI research, which among many other things does research into basic machine learning algorithms and systems and their applications, from medical analysis to image recognition and language translation.

A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Dean is a Google Senior Fellow and senior vice president for Google Research and Google Health at Google, Mountain View, CA, USA.