Thomas Dean (computer scientist) Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Dean served as the Deputy Provost of Brown University from 2003 to 2005, as the chair of Brown’s Computer Science Department from 1997 until 2002, and as the Acting Vice President for Computing and Information Services from 2001 until 2002. As Deputy Provost he helped develop and launch new multidisciplinary programs in genomics and the brain sciences as well as oversee substantial changes in the medical school and university libraries.

Working with his collaborators, James Allen and Yiannis Aloimonos specializing in respectively computer vision and natural language processing, Dean wrote one of the first modern AI textbooks incorporating probability theory, machine learning and robotics, and placing traditional AI topics such as symbolic reasoning and knowledge representation using the predicate calculus within a broader context. The first and only edition published in December 1994 initially competed with the first edition of Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach that came out in 1995, but was eclipsed by the second edition of the Russell and Norvig text released in 2003.

Dean was named a fellow of AAAI in 1994 and an ACM fellow in 2009. He has served on the Executive Council of AAAI and the Computing Research Association Board of Directors. He was a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. He served as program co-chair for the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the program chair for the 1999 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in Stockholm. He was a founding member of the Academic Alliance of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and a former member of the IJCAI Inc. Board of Trustees.

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. 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.

As co-chair of the 1991 AAAI Conference Dean organized a press event featuring mobile robots carrying trays of canapés and barely avoiding the participants. The coverage on the evening news was enthusiastically positive and in 1992, Dean and Peter Bonasso, with feedback from the robotics community, created the AAAI Robotics Competition featuring events aimed at showing off robots competing in events that involved performing tasks in the home, office, and disaster sites . The competition was still being held in 2010.

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. In particular, he introduced the idea of the anytime algorithm and was the first to apply the factored Markov decision process to robotics. He has authored several influential textbooks on artificial intelligence.