Tom Dean is a full-time research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California. From 1993 to 2007 he was Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. He still considers Brown his academic home and remains associated with the university through his Adjunct Professor position in Computer Science. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in 1982 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1984 and 1986 respectively. His research interests include automated planning and control, computational biology, machine learning, neural modeling, probabilistic inference, robotics and spatial and temporal reasoning.


Dean was named a fellow of AAAI in 1994 and an ACM fellow in 2009. He served as the Deputy Provost of Brown University from 2003 to 2005, as the chair of Brown's Computer Science Department from 1997 until 2002, and as the Acting Vice President for Computing and Information Services from 2001 until 2002. He was a founding member of the Academic Alliance of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and a former member of the IJCAI Inc. Board of Trustees. He has served on the Executive Council of AAAI and the Computing Research Association Board of Directors. He was a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. He served as program co-chair for the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the program chair for the 1999 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in Stockholm.


Dean is co-author with Mike Wellman of the Morgan-Kaufmann text entitled Planning and Control which ties together techniques from artificial intelligence, operations research, control theory, and the decision sciences. He is co-author with James Allen and John Aloimonos of Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice, an introductory text in Artificial Intelligence. His latest book Talking With Computers is published by Cambridge University Press and examines a wide range of topics from digital logic and machine language to artificial intelligence and searching the web.


Here is some additional, less academic biographical information:

My undergraduate education consisted of a double major in mathematics and philosophy. As an undergraduate, I couldn't imagine myself as an academic or working in computer science. My path to becoming a professor was anything but straight; I've made a living as a sculptor, furniture maker, architect, building contractor, and machinist. Being a scientist and a teacher is by far the most satisfying. I still enjoy many of the things that I picked up in college, including listening to and playing jazz and blues guitar. I love swimming, though I no longer swim competitively. I got hooked on wind surfing a few decades back, and occasionally I steal away to spend a few hours on the bay when the wind is up. Every summer for seven years, I worked with a team of undergraduate women from Brown to run the Artemis Program, a summer outreach program for girls entering the 9th grade interested in science and technology, and I continue to be concerned with the small numbers of women entering computer science and am constantly on the lookout for creative ways to encourage their participation our field.


For more information of an academic sort, see my curriculum vitae (HTML or PDF).