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UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean wins 2012 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award

The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by the computer systems research community, to be given annually to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in computer systems research.  The recipient must have begun his or her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC.

This week, the 2012 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award was presented jointly to UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean and MIT CSAIL Ph.D. alum Sanjay Ghemawat.  Quoting from the nomination:

“Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were among the first 20 employees at Google. Together, they led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary software infrastructure. This software infrastructure has transformed our understanding of how to compute at enormous scale; has allowed Google to grow gracefully over many orders of magnitude in the number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system; and has led to the advent of “cloud computing.” Dean and Ghemawat played particularly central roles in the creation of MapReduce (a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications) and BigTable (a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath a number of Google products). … Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are brilliant and visionary engineers who truly have changed the world.”

Jeff is the third UW CSE Ph.D. alum to receive the Weiser Award in its 12-year history:  Brian Bershad (now with Google in Moscow) was recognized in 2004, and Tom Anderson (now a UW CSE faculty member) was recognized in 2005.

Congratulations Jeff!