Artificial Intelligence Control Dean and Wellman's book
Planning and Control Anytime Algorithms The term
anytime algorithm was coined by Dean and Boddy in the late '80s. The focus of Dean and Boddy's work in this area has been on deliberation scheduling applied to time-dependent planning problems. Deliberation scheduling is the explicit allocation of resources to tasks (in most cases anytime algorithms) so as to maximize the total value of an agent's computation. Time-dependent planning problems are defined to be planning problems where the time available for responding to events varies from situation to situation. In addition to defining the basic concepts, Dean and Boddy provided theoretical analyses and applications in robotics and operations research.
Markov Processes Dean played a leading role in the adoption of the framework of Markov decision processes (MDPs) as a foundational tool in artificial intelligence. In particular, he pioneered the use of AI representations and algorithms for || factoring || complex models and problems into weakly-interacting subparts to improve computational efficiency. His work in state estimation emphasized temporal causal reasoning and the integration with probabilistic graphical models. His work in control includes state-space partitioning, hierarchical methods,
AI Textbook 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.
Robotics As co-chair of the 1991 AAAI Conference Dean organized a press event featuring mobile robots carrying trays of canaps 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.
Computational Neuroscience Stanford Course After starting as a research scientist at Google, Dean was appointed as a consulting professor at Stanford and began teaching a course with the title
Computational Models of the Neocortex. During the next fifteen years he invited top neuroscientists from all over the world to give talks and advise students working on class projects. Several of the classes resulted in papers coauthored by students that led to research projects at Google.
Neuromancer Project In an effort to create a team focusing on scalable computational neuroscience, Dean and his students at Stanford produced a white paper entitled
Technology Prospects and Investment Opportunities for Scalable Neuroscience Viren Jain is currently the project manager and lead scientist for the ongoing effort at Google. The resulting data on brain connectivity, including the 'hemibrain' connectome, a highly detailed map of neuronal connectivity in the fly brain and the 'H01' dataset, a 1.4 petabyte rendering of a small sample of human brain tissue, was publicly released.
Google Brain Dean led some of the earliest investigations into the use of neural networks at Google, that directly led to the creation of the Google Brain project. He experimented with approaches for using hardware acceleration to overcome current performance limitations in building industrial-scale web services, and collaborated with Dean Gaudet on the
Google Infrastructure and Platforms Team to make the case for introducing graphic processing units (GPU) in Google data centers. He worked closely with Vincent Vanhoucke, who led the perception research and speech recognition quality team, to demonstrate the value of GPUs for training and deploying deep neural network architectures in the cloud focusing on speech recognition for
Google Search by Voice. ==Administrative and Professional Services==