Dean Wampler

Dean Wampler, Ph.D. is an expert in AI/ML systems and general software engineering practices. He leads AI-focused engineering teams at IBM Research for Project Wisdom, Hugging Face utilization with open-source contributions, Ray-based pipelines and open-source contributions, and various OpenShift-focused technologies. Previously, he lead engineering for the Accelerated Discovery Platform (ADP), which was a planned commercial offering of IBM Research technologies for drug discovery and material science, and digital health applications. ADP provided AI-based simulation and modeling frameworks like GT4SD, Deep Search, and ST4SD. It integrated with quantum computing systems. It was built on AWS cloud services.

Before IBM, Dean was a Principal Software Engineer at Domino Data Lab, where he worked on the Domino platform for Data Science and MLOps.

Before Domino, Dean was one of the first engineers hired from outside U.C. Berkeley at Anyscale, where he worked on scalable ML with Ray and ran their developer relations program.

Before Anyscale, Dean was VP of Fast Data Engineering at Lightbend, where he worked on distributed streaming data systems with Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, and other tools.

Dean is the author of Programming Scala, Third Edition, What Is Ray?, Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications, and Functional Programming for Java Developers. He is the coauthor of Hardware > Software > Process and Programming Hive, plus chapters in 97 Things Every Java Developer Should Know, 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know, and Clean Code.

Dean blogs on various topics at deanwampler.medium.com, he is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups, and he contributes to several open source projects. Dean received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the University of Washington, where he first discovered his love of programming.