When: Monday, May 19, 4:00 p.m.

Where: Google Pittsburgh
Lower LevelCollaborative Innovation Center

Alfred Spector,
Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
at Google

Google Pittsburgh Seminar

Abstract:
Space is limited so please register for the talk here: http://tinyurl.com/4o6dlc

At its core, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The breadth of this mission, coupled with Google's services-based delivery model, provides Google great opportunities to perform research and to innovate in many areas of technology. In this presentation, Dr. Spector discusses the implication of Google's mission, organization, and delivery model on its approach to research and its research agenda. Dr. Spector will also describe areas of great opportunity, particularly ones that combine scale of computation and the ability to learn continually from user interactions.

Alfred Spector is Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google – typically projects with high strategic value to the company, but somewhat outside the mainstream of current products. Previously, Dr. Spector was Vice President of Strategy and Technology at 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 Research for IBM, and General Manager of the Transaction Processing Software Business. Dr. Spector was the 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 his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. 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 work in scalable architectures and distributed systems. He is married to Dr. Rhonda Kost and a father of three young children.

Registration requested.

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