 As a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in the 2018-19 academic year, Spector has presented these positions at various universities around the United States.In 2001, Spector received the IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for his contributions to distributed computing systems and applications.He and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University won the 2016 ACM Software systems Award for developing the Andrew File System (AFS).