Thomas Dean (computer scientist)

Thomas L. Dean
Thomas Dean in 2012
Born1950 (age 73–74)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materVirginia Polytechnic Institute
Yale University
Known forANYTIME ALGORITHMS
AwardsAAAI Fellow (1994)[1]
ACM Fellow (2009) [2]
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsGoogle
Stanford University
Brown University
Thesis Temporal Imagery: An Approach to Reasoning about Time for Planning and Problem Solving  (1985)
Doctoral advisorDrew McDermott
Websitecs.brown.edu/people/tdean/

Thomas L. Dean (born 1950) is an American computer scientist known for his work in robot planning, probabilistic graphical models, and computational neuroscience. He was one of the first to introduce ideas from operations research and control theory to artificial intelligence.[3] In particular, he introduced the idea of the anytime algorithm and was the first to apply the factored Markov decision process to robotics.[4][5] He has authored several influential textbooks on artificial intelligence.[3][6][7]

He was a professor at Brown University from 1993 to 2007, holding roles including department chair, acting vice president for computing and information services, and deputy provost.[8] In 2006 he started working at Google, where he was instrumental in helping the Google Brain project get its start. He is currently an emeritus professor at Brown and a lecturer and research fellow at Stanford.[9]

  1. ^ "Elected AAAI Fellows". AAAI. Retrieved September 3, 2023.
  2. ^ "ACM Fellows". awards.acm.org. Retrieved September 3, 2023.
  3. ^ a b Dean, Thomas; Wellman, Michael (1991). Planning and Control. Morgan Kaufmann.
  4. ^ "Four Googlers elected ACM Fellows". 2009.
  5. ^ Thomas Dean publications indexed by Google Scholar
  6. ^ Dean, Thomas; Allen, James; Aloimonos, Yiannis (1995). Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice. Addison-Wesley.
  7. ^ Dean, Thomas (2004). Talking with Computers. Cambridge University Press.
  8. ^ "Tom Dean academic biography".
  9. ^ "Thomas L Dean, Stanford Bio".