Spencer Whitehead is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where is advised by Dr. Heng Ji. His interests broadly span natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning, but mainly lie in the intersection of these fields: multimedia information extraction/retrieval and natural language generation from multimedia data.
A primary goal of his work is to develop intelligent systems that can extract information from large quantities of unstructured, multimodal data as well as convey this information through coherent, knowledgeable, and concise text. Central to his research is the creation of novel mathematical models, deep learning or otherwise, which can properly incorporate such real-world, heterogeneous data.
Through internships and research grants, Spencer has both led and contributed to projects supported by organizations such as the US Department of Defense (DARPA), IBM, and the US Army Research Lab, which have resulted in peer-reviewed publications at top conferences as well as software that is actively used in the field.
In 2016, he received his Bachelors of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with highest honors.