Jeffrey Dean awarded prestigious IEEE John von Neumann Medal
Alumnus Jeffrey Dean (B.S. 1990) was honored with the 2021 John von Neumann Medal in recognition of his “contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems and artificial intelligence systems.”
John von Neumann Medal, which is among the highest honors IEEE bestows upon members of the engineering community, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions in computer hardware, software or systems that have had a lasting impact on technology, society, and the engineering profession.
Dean is currently a Google Senior Fellow and senior vice president of Google Research and Google Health.
He joined Google in 1999, roughly a year after its founding — making him one of the company’s longest-serving employees. During his tenure, Dean led the conception, design and implementation of core elements of Google’s search, advertising and cloud infrastructure that would transform the internet and computing as we know it. His contributions included five generations of the company’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems. Dean was also responsible for the initial development of Google’s AdSense for Content, which revolutionized online advertising by enabling content creators to monetize their websites.
Dean’s subsequent contributions to internet-scale data storage and processing, in collaboration with Google colleague Sanjay Ghemawat, helped propel the company to the forefront of cloud computing. He played a leading role in the design and implementation of MapReduce, a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications. To date, the paper presenting MapReduce has garnered more than 30,000 citations and inspired future advances in distributed computing. Dean and Ghemawat were also central figures in the development of BigTable, a semi-structured data storage system designed for flexibility and high performance while scaling to petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. BigTable underpins a variety of Google products and services, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. Along the way, Dean also contributed to the development and implementation of Google News, Google Translate, and a variety of other projects that enhanced Google’s data management, job scheduling, and code search infrastructure.
More recently, Dean has accelerated Google’s leadership in artificial intelligence as co-founder of the Google Brain team focused on the fundamental science of machine learning as well as projects aimed at infusing the company’s products with the latest developments in the field. The team has been responsible for advancing the technology of deep learning and its impact on computer vision, speech, machine translation, natural language processing, and a variety of other applications. One of Dean’s crowning achievements in this area is TensorFlow, an open-source platform for the large-scale training and deployment of deep learning models. TensorFlow offered unprecedented flexibility to application developers and to support experimentation with novel training algorithms and optimizations.
Dean is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the ACM and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Together with his collaborator, Ghemawat, he earned the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award from the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Operating Systems in 2011 and the ACM–Infosys Foundation Award — now known as the ACM Prize in Computing, one of the highest honors bestowed by the organization — in 2012 for introducing revolutionary software infrastructure that advanced internet-scale computing.
Edited from University of Washington Allen School news article