Alfred Z. Spector

Dr. Alfred Spector is a Visiting Scholar at MIT whose career began with innovation in large scale, networked computing systems (at Stanford, as a professor at CMU, and as founder of Transarc) and then transitioned to research leadership (first leading IBM Software Research, subsequently Google Research, and then as CTO of Two Sigma Investments). In addition to his managerial career, Dr. Spector has lectured widely on the growing importance of computer science across all disciplines ("CS+X"), and he has just completed a book entitled Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, and Opportunities (Spector, Norvig, Wiggins, and Wing; Cambridge University Press; 2022). He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves on its Council. Dr. Spector won the 2001 IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing, was co-awarded the 2016 ACM Software Systems Award, and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford and an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.