Dr. Alfred Z. Spector

Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
Google, Inc.

Dr. Alfred Z. Spector is a technology consultant and was recently vice president of strategy and technology and CTO of IBM’s Software Business, responsible for Technical and Business Strategy, various technical/business initiatives, standards, and software engineering across the worldwide software group. Prior to that, he was vice president of Services and Software in IBM Research responsible for IBM’s worldwide services and software research. Before that, Dr. Spector was the general manager of Marketing and Strategy for IBM's AIM business, responsible for a number of IBM software product families including CICS, WebSphere, and MQSeries, and the general manager of IBM's Transaction Systems software business. Dr. Spector was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Spector is a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Dr. Spector remains active in the field of distributed computing, but his interests have inevitably broadened due to his recent job assignments.

Dr. Spector received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society’s Tsutomu Kanai Award for major contributions to state-of-the-art distributed computing systems and their applications. He is married to Dr. Rhonda Kost and a father of three young children.

Reprinted with kind permission from Alfred Spector.