Jeff Dean

Google senior fellow and leader of the artificial intelligence division, Jeff Dean is a mastermind software engineer. Incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable on a range of computer science topics, he is a captivating speaker and an expert in his field. Dean’s discussion centres around his digital career, time at Google and his stories of discovery and invention are inspirational. After receiving a degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Minnesota, Jeff Dean started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation. Whilst at DEC he worked on microprocessor architecture and information retrieval in the research laboratory.

In 1999 Dean joined Google and after less than a year a major systems failure created an opportunity for him to work alongside, friend and colleague, Sanjay Ghemawat. The pair found and more importantly fixed the issue, and in turn, their lucrative careers at Google began. During his career at Google, Dean developed five generations of the crawling and indexing system, which he recently gave a talk on at WSDM’09. He also designed and implemented the advertising structure and contributed to the system design of Google Translate. As the best in his field and an instrumental figure in the Google we know today, Jeff Dean was made a level 11 Senior Fellow. As a senior fellow he now leads the Google Brain project, set up in 2011, that is responsible for the research into artificial intelligence, with Dean’s favoured area of research being large scale distributed systems.

Throughout his vast career, Jeff Dean has been recognised for his incredible achievements. In 2009 he was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery; the world’s largest scientific and educational society. This was followed by the ACM prize in computing in 2012, awarded for innovative contributions in computing. Amongst a collection of other well deserved prizes, Jeff Dean has been recognised most recently as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which honours excellence in his field. As a speaker, Jeff Dean offers a unique insight into working for and developing one of the world’s most successful businesses. His expertise is unrivalled in software engineering and his impressive career makes for a fascinating talk.