Distinguished Alumni Award

About the Award

The Computer Science and Engineering department confers the Distinguished Alumni Award once every two years to a graduate of the department who has distinguished herself or himself in their profession, in a highly recognizable manner.

About the 2007 Recipient: Jeffrey Dean

Photo of Jeffrey Dean

CSE alumnus Jeffrey Dean (B.S. 90) works at Google in California as Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. He has a passion for building useful systems, and is willing to tackle any problem, no matter how daunting it looks. Dean’s contributions at Google range from low level libraries to high level components and services, all used extensively by various groups and products at Google as building blocks.

He has helped design and implement five generations of the software to handle searches entered on google.com, and played important roles in several of Google’s advertising products. Dean has also worked on key pieces of distributed systems infrastructure, including MapReduce and BigTable. Bigtable is used underneath more than 80 Google products, and MapReduce is the primary system used for large-scale batch computations at Google. These and other contributions by Dean play a critical role in the scaling of Google’s Web search system so that it can handle thousands of queries per second over billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996. Before joining Google, he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, where he worked on low-overhead profiling tools, design of profiling hardware for out-of-order microprocessors, and Web-based information retrieval. From 1990 to 1991, he worked for the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, developing software to do statistical modeling, forecasting, and analysis of the HIV pandemic.

To learn more, visit Jeffrey Dean’s Web page.

Past Recipients

2005

Don Krantz, BA 1990, PhD 1995

For his dynamic contributions to the development of system architecture, and mobile robots, and bringing the technology to local companies, such as MTS Systems Corporation.

2003

Richard Weinberg, MS 1976, PhD 1982

For his original contributions and leadership in the areas of Computer Graphics and Animation, and their application to the Media Arts and Sciences.

2001

Arvind, Professor of Computer Science, MIT, MS 1972, PhD 1973

For his pioneering research in parallel computing, dataflow architectures, and declarative programming languages.

1999

Theodore C. Johnson, BS 1982

For his innovations in technical diagramming software, and for bringing them to practice as founding Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Visio Inc.