Alfred Z. Spector has been Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google since November 2007. Prior to that he was a researcher and software executive at IBM. For several years, he was in charge of all of IBM's software research, including the position of Vice President of Strategy and Technology within IBM's Software Group.[1]
Spector was a founder of Transarc Corporation which built and sold distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems software. Prior to founding Transarc, Spector was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, he served as doctoral advisor to Randy Pausch. In 2001, Spector 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.
Spector received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.