Alfred Z. Spector Biography
Alfred Z. Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager. He currently serves as the CTO of Two Sigma Investments. In 2001, he was the recipient of IEEE Computer Society’s Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.
Education
Alfred attended Harvard University where he emerged with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Applied Mathematics, and later, a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University received in 1981. In those times, his research explored communication architectures for building multiprocessors out of network-linked computers. They also showed measurements of remote procedure call operations on experimental Ethernet.
Alfred named his work ‘Multiprocessing Architectures for Local Computer Networks’. As he was going on with this work, he received regular advice from Forest Baskett III.
Career
Alfred, in his early years, was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University(CMU). While there, he served as a doctoral advisor to Randy Pausch, Jeff Eppinger, and Joshua Bloch as well as seven other computer science enthusiasts. Sometime later, he launched the Trancarc Corporation. The company was officially launched in 1989 with Alfred credited as one of its founders.
Transarc built and sold distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems software, commercializing the Andrew File System developed at CMU. A while after, the company was acquired by IBM. After the acquisition, Alfred started working as the vice president of global software research for IBM. Later he was promoted to become the vice president of strategy and technology within IBM’s Software Group.
Alfred then joined Google as vice president of research in November 2007 after leaving IBM. He worked there until his retirement in early 2015. In October 2015 he was hired by technology-driven hedge fund Two Sigma Investments to serve as the CTO. He still works in the position to date.
Writing|speaking
Alfred has written and spoken on various topics, particularly those related to computer science and engineering. He described the ever-growing field of computer science in 2004. In this talk, he also gave his suggestions that computer science should be inducted into all disciplines using the phrase CS+X. He, along with his co-authors, Peter Norvig, and Slav Petrov, created a model for computer science research in industry. They used their experience from working in Google to write “Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research”.
For some time now, Alfred has been advocating for a more balanced and critical approach toward data science. This is greatly shown in his presentation “Opportunities and Perils in Data Science” where he argued that when looking at data science the disciplines in humanities and social sciences should also be included. While serving as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in the 2018-19 academic year, he has aired these opinions in various Universities throughout the United States.
Advisory Committees
Alfred has served on several advisory committees due to his exceptional known surrounding computer science. Some of his roles include chairing the NSF CISE Advisory Committee from 2004-2005; as well as offering his advice in various university advisory committees including at CCNY, CMU, Harvard, Rice, and Stanford. From 2006-13, he was on the board of the National Academy Computer Science and Telecommunication.
He has also served as the chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Section of the National Academy of Engineering.
Alfred Z. Spector Age
He was born as Alfred Zalmon Spector on October 14, 1954, in the U.S. As of 2018, he is 64 years old.
Alfred Z. Spector Wife | Kids
He is married to Rhonda Spector. Together, the couple has three children.
Alfred Z. Spector Net worth
His net worth is still under review.
Alfred Z. Spector Awards
Alfred has been awarded the Tsutomu Kanai Award in 2001 from the IEEE Computer Society for his work in developing global computing systems and applications. He was also inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. Two years later, he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2009, he joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 where he currently serves on the council.
In 2016, he won an ACM Software systems Award for developing the Andrew File System (AFS), along with some of the other researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University. The year after, Alfred appeared in the Institutional Investor 2017 Tech 40.
Alfred Z. Spector Youtube
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