Dr. Alfred Zalmon Spector

An American computer scientist and research manager, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, where his research included measurements of remote procedure call operations on experimental Ethernet. His dissertation was titled ?Multiprocessing Architectures for Local Computer Networks?, and his advisor was Forest Baskett III. He was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While there, he served as doctoral advisor to Randy Pausch, Jeff Eppinger and Joshua Bloch and seven others. He was a founder of Transarc Corporation in 1989 which built and sold distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems software; commercializing the Andrew File System developed at CMU; a distributed file system which uses a set of trusted servers to present a homogeneous, location-transparent file name space to all the client workstations. Transarc was purchased by IBM in 1994 and became the IBM Pittsburgh Lab in 1999, after which he became a researcher and software executive at IBM. His positions included; 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 also the General Manager of IBM's Transaction Systems business. Other positions he held were Vice President of Services and Software at IBM Research where he was responsible for IBM's worldwide services and software research. He was also Vice President of Strategy and Technology within IBM's Software Group. In addition, he remained an advisor to CMU. He is on the Board of the Security Industry Middleware Council, the NSF CISE Advisory Board, and the Computer Research Association. In 2001, he received the IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for his contributions to distributed computing systems and applications. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. In 2006 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He also served on the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age that focused on how to use information and information technology to improve national security while protecting traditional civil liberties. In November 2007 he joined Google as Vice President of Research.