Jeffrey Dean is a computer scientist who joined Google in mid-1999 and is the company’s Chief Scientist, focusing on AI advances across Google DeepMind and Google Research. According to his Google Research profile, he is widely known for designing and building large-scale systems that underpin both the web and modern machine learning.
Early in his Google career, Dean co-created the data-infrastructure trio of MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner, software systems that let Google process and store data across thousands of machines and that inspired a generation of open-source imitators. His profile describes him as a designer of three generations of deep learning systems: DistBelief, TensorFlow, which he championed for open-sourcing, and Pathways. He co-authored the word2vec work on word embeddings and helped lead development of the PaLM and Gemini language models.
In 2011 Dean co-founded the Google Brain project, the effort that brought deep learning into Google’s products at scale. He is also credited as a co-creator of knowledge distillation, the technique for compressing a large model into a smaller one, and of sparse model architectures. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an ACM Fellow.