Heather Sue Mercer
| Robert Mercer | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert Leroy Mercer July 11, 1946 San Jose, California, U.S. |
| Education |
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (BS) University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MS, PhD) |
| Occupation | Hedge fund manager |
| Spouse(s) | Diana Lynne (Dean) Mercer |
| Children | 3, including Rebekah |
Robert Leroy Mercer (born July 11, 1946), better known as Bob Mercer, is an American computer scientist, a developer in early artificial intelligence, and co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund.
Mercer is a major funder of organizations supporting a right-wing agenda, such as Breitbart News,Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president and Brexit in the United Kingdom. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.
Mercer grew up in New Mexico. He developed an early interest in computers and in 1964 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia where he learned to program a donated IBM computer. He went on to get a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico. While working on his degree he had a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base writing programs where, though he felt he produced good work, he felt it was not optimized. He later said the experience left him with a "jaundiced view" of government-funded research. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972.
Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique as part of a speech recognition and translation research program led by Frederick Jelinek and Lalit Bahl. In June 2014, Mercer received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award for this work.
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