Biography

Dr. Alfred Spector is a Visiting Scholar at MIT. His 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 (As global VP of IBM Software Research, Google Research, and then as CTO of Two Sigma Investments). Dr. Spector has lectured widely on the growing importance of computer science across all disciplines (“CS+X”), and he has just completed: Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, and Opportunities (Spector, Norvig, Wiggins, & Wing; Cambridge Univ. Press; 2022). He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves on its Council. Dr. Spector was a Hertz Fellow, 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 from Stanford and an A.B. from Harvard.