Spencer Whitehead
Research Scientist at Microsoft
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSpencer Whitehead is a research scientist based in New York with 11 years of experience advancing computer vision, NLP, and machine learning across industry and academia. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UIUC and has held research roles at Meta, Scale AI, and now Microsoft, blending deep theoretical knowledge with applied research in production settings. His background includes internships and research stints at IBM and RPI, giving him a strong foundation in both applied mathematics and AI systems. Known for moving between lab and product environments, he focuses on turning cutting-edge models into robust, deployable solutions—a skill sharpened during his postdoc and industry transitions. Outside typical research outputs, he maintains a public-facing portfolio at spencerwhitehead.com that highlights his cross-disciplinary projects and reproducible experiments.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (25)
acl10
computational-linguistics10
phonetics10
natural-language-processing10
visual-question-answering9
prompt-tuning7
sequence6
prompt5
multimodal5
machine-learning4
api4
sequence-to-sequence4
computer-vision4
deep-learning3
python3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
SpencerWhitehead/DistributedSystemsProject1
Oct 2016 - Jan 2021
Contributions:29 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years 3 months
SpencerWhitehead/NewsVideoDataset
Aug 2018 - Sep 2018
Contributions:21 commits, 17 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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