Alfred Spector

Google Research

Other Google Resources

Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Alfred Spector joined Google in November of 2007. Alfred was recently Vice President of Strategy and Technology and CTO of IBM's Software Business. Prior to that he was Vice President of Services and Software at IBM Research. 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. While at CMU he did fundamental work in a number of areas, including the Andrew File System that changed the face of distributed computing.

Alfred 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.

Selected Publications

A weighted voting algorithm for replicated directories, Joshua J. Bloch, Dean S. Daniels, Alfred Z. Spector, Journal of the ACM, vol. 34 (1987), pp. 859-909.
High Performance Distributed Transaction Processing in a General Purpose Computing Environment, Alfred Z. Spector, Jeffrey L. Eppinger, Dean S. Daniels, Richard Draves, Joshua J. Bloch, Dan Duchamp, Randy F. Pausch, Dean S. Thompson, HPTS, 1987, pp. 220-242.
The Camelot Project, Alfred Z. Spector, Joshua J. Bloch, Dean S. Daniels, Richard Draves, Dan Duchamp, Jeffrey L. Eppinger, Sherri G. Menees, Dean S. Thompson, IEEE Database Eng. Bull., vol. 9 (1986), pp. 23-34.
The ITC Distributed File System: Principles and Design, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, John H. Howard, David A. Nichols, Robert N. Sidebotham, Alfred Z. Spector, Michael J. West, SOSP, 1985, pp. 35-50.