Past Recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award

About the 2007 Recipient: 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.

About the 2005 Recipient: Don Krantz

This year’s distinguished alumni award recipient, Dr. Krantz, is currently Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at MTS Systems Corporation, a global supplier of testing products and industrial sensors. MTS testing products help customers accelerate and improve their design, development, and manufacturing processes and are used for determining the mechanical behavior of materials, products, and structures. Dr. Krantz has also held the positions of Vice President of Engineering and Technology for MTS’ Test Division, Vice President, Advanced Systems Division, and Program Manager in the Advanced Systems Division. Prior to coming to MTS, Dr. Krantz was an Engineering Fellow at Honeywell Defense Systems Division and Alliant Techsystems Inc.

His technical accomplishments are seminal and span a variety of technical areas. He wrote the AVOS CP/M-based operating system for the blind and visually impaired in the early 1980’s. Working for Honeywell in the late 1980’s, he was a systems engineer helping to prototype several remotely-piloted and autonomous land vehicle concepts for the military. He wrote the Ada-based Aladdex operating system for the DARPA Aladdin multiprocessor. During this time, he was a lead developer of the automatic fire control system for the Paladin M109E5 Howitzer, the first fielded military system using embedded Ada software. At MTS in the 1990’s, he worked with Prof. Maria Gini (he was awarded a CSE Ph.D. working under her guidance) and Prof. Max Donath on various aspects of system architecture and localization subsystems for mobile robots, including RoboCart and the MnDOT SafeTruck. He was one of the main developers of the DARPA Distributed Robotics program Scout robot working with Prof. Nikos Papanikolopoulos, defining operational concepts, mechanical designs and writing the first set of embedded software. During this same period, he developed several systems for AeroMet Corp, DARPA, the Army Research Lab, and Lockheed Martin for 3-D direct fabrication of titanium components using laser-additive manufacturing. Working with Profs. Sue Mantell, Dennis Polla, Ramesh Harjani, and others, he was the PI and systems engineer for a novel remotely-queried embedded wireless strain sensor using RFID technology and MEMS strain sensors. He was project engineer for several large-scale seismic research shaker tables, including the multi-table system at the Bridge Structures Lab at UNR. He has published two books and has publication credits on about 60 articles in various trade magazines and academic journals.