In the New York Times special section on Cloud Computing (which also identified Seattle as the “the center of the most intensive engineering in cloud computing”), CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean – Google Senior Fellow – is quoted extensively:
“Jeff Dean, a research fellow at Google, focuses on accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence in tasks like computer vision and understanding the meaning of words. Until a few years ago, for example, Google image searches were executed mainly by identifying the text labels affixed to pictures. Today, many images are identified by software analyzing the patterns of digital pixels in a picture or video. And, Mr. Dean said, the technology can pick out a leopard in a picture, and know it is not a lion or a cheetah, recognizing the distinctive pixel patterns of various big cats.
“Mobilizing the firepower of Google’s large cloud data centers, Mr. Dean said, enables his team to ‘bring a lot of computation to bear on these kinds of problems.’ …
“His team’s advanced artificial intelligence research, known as deep learning, is ‘loosely inspired by knowledge of how the brain works,’ Mr. Dean said. But there are things the human brain does that silicon-based computing still only aspires to …
“‘We don’t have a great handle on how to build those kinds of dynamically evolving memory systems,’ Mr. Dean said. ‘Google and others are working on that, but it’s really nascent.'”
Read more here.
Jeff will receive the 2014 University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Alumni Achievement Award at our graduation ceremony on Saturday.