Google Technology RoundTable

• Map Reduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, by Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Wilson C. Hsieh, Deborah A. Wallach, Mike Burrows, Tushar Chandra, Andrew Fikes, and Robert E. Gruber
• Jeff Dean's page
• Sanjay Ghemawat's page
• Jerry Zhao's page
• Matt Austern's page

Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives

Alfred joined Google in November of 2007 and is responsible for the research across Google and also a growing collection of special initiatives - typically projects with high strategic value to the company, but somewhat outside the mainstream of current products.

Previously, Alfred was Vice President of Strategy and Technology for IBM's Software Business. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Services and Software Research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in highly reliable and scalable distributed computing.

Alfred received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and his AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.

Jeff Dean, Google Fellow

Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow working in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Jeff has designed and implemented large portions of the company's advertising, crawling, indexing and query serving systems, along with various pieces of the distributed computing infrastructure that underlying most of Google's products. At various times, Jeff has also worked on improving search quality, statistical machine translation, and various internal software development tools. He has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process.

Prior to joining Google, Jeff was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval. Earlier, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Jeff is an author of more than 20 publications and a co-inventor on more than 25 patents. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Minnesota and received his MS and PhD in computer science from the University of Washington.

Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Fellow

Sanjay works on the distributed computing infrastructure that is used by most Google products. He has led the design and implementation of various storage systems (GFS, Bigtable), a batch processing system (MapReduce), networking libraries, data representation languages, memory management systems, and various performance measurement tools.

Previously, Sanjay was a researcher at DEC's Systems Research Center, where he worked on performance measurement tools, Java virtual machines, and Java compilers.

Jerry Zhao, Software Engineer

Jerry Zhao is a software engineer at Google and the tech lead for project MapReduce. Before joining Google, he was a post-doc researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. He also taught at San Francisco State University.

Jerry received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California, and his BS from Fudan University. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, mobile networks, and distributed systems in general.

Matt Austern, Software Engineer

Matt Austern is a software engineer at Google, and works on MapReduce and other distributed computation systems. His interests include compilers and languages, library design, and generic programming. Matt is also the author of Generic Programming and the STL.