Tom Dean is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University.

Dean received his B.A. in mathematics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1986. His general research interests include temporal and spatial reasoning, planning, robotics, learning, and probabilistic inference. His current research is concerned with theories of temporal and spatial inference for reasoning about actions and processes. Of particular interest are problems in which the notion of risk is complicated by there being limited time for both deliberation and action.

Dean is a fellow of AAAI and a member of the board of trustees for IJCAI Inc. He was the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, served as the program co-chair for the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and he is the program chair for the 1999 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence to held in in Stockholm, Sweden. He 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. His latest book is Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice with James Allen and John Aloimonos and published by Benjamin Cummings.

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, house 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 years back, and occasionally I steal away from the department to spend a few hours wind surfing on Narragansett Bay.

For more information of an academic sort, see a postscript version of Tom Dean's curriculum vitae.