Several years ago, we established the tradition of honoring two outstanding UW Computer Science & Engineering alumni each year as part of our graduation ceremony. In doing this, we have three objectives:
- To honor some of our most distinguished alumni by recognizing their extraordinary achievements.
- To ensure that graduating students know that they are joining a long tradition of excellence and accomplishment.
- To inspire current members of the UW CSE graduating class.
The recipients of the 2014 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Awards are Jeff Dean and Gail Murphy.
Jeff – a 1996 Ph.D. alum – is Senior Fellow at Google. Working with his colleague Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff is responsible for much of Google’s groundbreaking scalable infrastructure, such as MapReduce and BigTable. More recently he has turned his attention to “deep learning.” Jeff is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM, and recipient of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, the ACM Infosys Foundation Award, and the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.
Gail – also a 1996 Ph.D. alum – is Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated. Her research interests are in software engineering with a particular interest in improving the productivity of knowledge workers, including software developers.
Read more about Jeff and Gail in MSB here. Learn about our previous UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award winners here.