Robert Mercer (businessman)
| Robert Mercer | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert Leroy Mercer July 11, 1946 San Jose, California, U.S. |
| Residence | Long Island, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
University of New Mexico University of Illinois |
| Occupation | Hedge fund manager |
| Spouse(s) | Diana Lynne (Dean) Mercer |
| Children | Rebekah, Jennifer, Heather Sue |
Robert Leroy Mercer (born July 11, 1946) is an American computer scientist and co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund. He is a major donor to conservative political causes. Mercer has donated to Super PACs affiliated with Freedom Partners, Club for Growth Action, and John R. Bolton. 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. The experience “left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research,” he said. 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 after completing his PhD. Based at the Watson Research Centre in Yorktown (NY) he developed "Mercer Clustering", a now standard 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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