James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Leadership Series

The James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Leadership Series provides a forum for the Carnegie Mellon University community and its entrepreneurial network partners in Pittsburgh to discuss issues central to entrepreneurial leadership. The series brings to campus entrepreneurial thought leaders from centers around the country to exchange views on leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation in today’s competitive, global economy. Speakers include successful entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who are focused on emerging and growing market sectors that are important for competitiveness in the global economy. Lectures are open to all.

2024-2025 Speakers

Beyond Models – Applying AI and Data Science Effectively

Dr. Alfred Spector
Visiting Scholar at MIT
Senior Advisor at Blackstone

Thursday, September 12, 2024
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | ET
Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, Tepper Quad, 4765 Forbes Avenue, 3rd Floor

Applying artificial intelligence and data science effectively requires a considerably broader focus than just data and machine learning. Based on the speaker and his co-authors' recent book, Data Science in Context (and an associated MIT Course), this presentation distills these additional challenges into a rubric and illustrates its application with a number of examples. Beyond the rubric, the presentation also presents useful frameworks for making the complex trade-offs that are present and growing.  While the talk should have practical value to those applying and regulating AI and DS, it also illustrates contemporary research challenges.

 

Dr. Alfred Spector is a Visiting Scholar at MIT and a Senior Advisor at Blackstone. His career has led him from innovation in large scale, networked computing systems to broad engineering and research leadership. Recently, he co-authored a Cambridge University Press textbook, “Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities.” (See www.datascienceincontext.com)

Previously, Dr. Spector was CTO and Head of Engineering at Two Sigma Investments. Before that, he spent eight years as VP of Research and Special Initiatives at Google, and he held various senior-level positions at IBM, including as global VP of Services and Software Research and global CTO of IBM’s Software Business. Earlier in his career, he founded Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems.  He was also a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and he led its Information Technology Center in 1998 and 1999.

Spector was a Hertz Fellow at Stanford and is also a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Spector won the 2001 IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing and the 2016 ACM Software Systems Award. In 2018-19, Dr. Spector lectured widely as a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar (for example, on the growing importance of computer science across all disciplines based on the evocative phrase, “CS+X”). He has been a member of the ACM Turing Award Committee and has done national service through chairing the NSF’s CISE Advisory Board and his membership on the Army and Defense Science Boards. Dr. Spector obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford and a B.A. in applied math from Harvard.

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