Thomas Dean (computer scientist)
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.
Thomas L. Dean | |
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Thomas Dean in 2012 | |
| Born | 1950 (age 73–74) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Virginia Polytechnic Institute Yale University |
| Known for | ANYTIME ALGORITHMS |
| Awards | AAAI Fellow (1994) ACM Fellow (2009) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Google Stanford University Brown University |
| Thesis | Temporal Imagery: An Approach to Reasoning about Time for Planning and Problem Solving (1985) |
| Doctoral advisor | Drew McDermott |
| Website | cs |
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.