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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. He was appointed Google's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into Google DeepMind.
He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages. 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".
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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 X Development in 2011 to investigate Deep learning, 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.
While at Google, he designed and implemented large portions of the company's advertising, Web crawler, Web 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:
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.
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.
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. For example:
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.
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