The impact of information-based technologies will continue to grow—probably at an accelerating rate. In nearly every segment of society, we see both quality and productivity improvements because of increased use of automation and digital communication. The impact is obviously huge in some sectors such as finance and publishing. And it will only grow in the … Continue reading “CS + X, for all X”
Author: Alfred Spector
Alfred Spector is Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google. Spector joined Google in 2007 and is responsible for research across Google and also a growing collection of special initiatives, such as open source, university relations and more. Recently Dr. Spector has assumed the executive engineering leadership for google.org, an effort that uses Google's strengths in information and technology to build products and advocate for policies that address global challenges. Dr. Spector speaks widely on research and innovation, and spends much time helping Google connect to the university research community.
Previously, Dr. Spector was vice president of strategy and technology IBM’s Software Business, and prior to that, he was vice president of services and software research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in highly reliable, highly scalable distributed computing.
Dr. Spector received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford and a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the IEEE and the ACM. Dr. Spector is also the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society’s Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.
The Challenge of Computing on a Planetary Scale: Inside Google’s Faculty Summit
For the first time, Google held its annual Americas Faculty Summit in our New York City offices. On July 14th and 15th, about 100 faculty members from universities in the western hemisphere attended the two-day summit, which focused on systems, artificial intelligence, and mobile computing. Google New York is our second largest office outside of … Continue reading “The Challenge of Computing on a Planetary Scale: Inside Google’s Faculty Summit”