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Jeffrey Dean
Google Fellow

I joined Google in mid-1999, and I'm currently a Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. My areas of interest include large-scale distributed systems, performance monitoring, compression techniques, information retrieval, application of machine learning to search and other related problems, microprocessor architecture, compiler optimizations, and development of new products that organize existing information in new and interesting ways. While at Google, I've worked on the following projects:

  • Google's initial advertising system.
  • The design and implementation of four generations of our crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, covering two and three orders of magnitude growth in number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system.
  • The initial development of Google's AdSense for Content product (involving both the production serving system design and implementation as well as work on developing and improving the quality of ad selection based on the contents of pages).
  • Some of the initial production serving system work for the Google News product, working with Krishna Bharat to move the prototype system he put together into a deployed system.
  • Some aspects of our search ranking algorithms, notably improved handling for dealing with off-page signals such as anchortext.
  • The first generation of our automated job scheduling system for managing a cluster of machines.
  • Prototyping infrastructure for rapid development and experimentation with new ranking algorithms.
  • MapReduce, a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications. A paper about MapReduce appeared in OSDI'04.
  • BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath a number of Google products. A paper about BigTable appeared in OSDI'06.
  • Some of the production system design aspects for Google's statistical machine translation system. In particular, I designed a system for distributed high-speed access to very large language models (too large to fit in memory on a single machine).
  • Some internal tools to make it easy to rapidly search our internal source code repository.
I enjoy developing software with great colleagues, and I've been fortunate to have worked with many wonderful and talented people on all of my work here at Google. To help ensure that Google continues to hire people with excellent technical skills, I've also been fairly involved in our engineering hiring process.

I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, working with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented languages in 1996. I received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990. From 1996 to 1999, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, where I worked on low-overhead profiling tools, design of profiling hardware for out-of-order microprocessors, and web-based information retrieval. From 1990 to 1991, I worked for the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software to do statistical modelling, forecasting, and analysis of the HIV pandemic.

Selected Publications:

Personal:

I've lived in lots of places in my life: Honolulu, HI; Manila, The Phillipines; Boston, MA; West Nile District, Uganda; Boston (again); Little Rock, AR; Hawaii (again); Minneapolis, MN; Mogadishu, Somalia; Atlanta, GA; Minneapolis (again); Geneva, Switzerland; Seattle, WA; and (currently) Palo Alto, CA. I'm hard-pressed to pick a favorite, though: each place has its plusses and minuses.

One of my life goals is to play basketball on every continent. So far, I've netted North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I'm worried that Antarctica might be tough, though.


Jeffrey Dean