Video of Robert Mercer - the billionaire backer of Cambridge Analytica & Trump - accepting the life time award from the ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics):
Robert Mercer Biography (via wikipedia):
Robert Leroy Mercer (born 1946) is an American computer scientist, who was a developer in early artificial intelligence. Mercer is a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Mercer developed an early interest in computers and in 1964. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972. While working on his degree he had a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base. Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972, where he co-developed Brown clustering, IBM's models which were the basics of statistical machine translation for decades. In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Later, Mercer and Peter Brown became co-CEOs of Renaissance. In November 2017 Mercer announced that he would be stepping down from his position at Renaissance. Mercer appears as a director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers, some of which appear to have been used to legally avoid US taxes.
Robert Mercer (et al)'s academic works:
- “Oh, yes, everything’s right on schedule, Fred": cs.jhu.edu/~post/bitext/
- The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: aclweb.org/anthology/J93-2003
- Class-Based n-gram Models of Natural Language: aclweb.org/anthology/J92-4003