Spencer Fowers

About

Spencer Fowers is a principal researcher in the Catalyst Lab, Microsoft Research Redmond.  He started at Microsoft in 2012 in the Windows Phone division. After two years he joined Microsoft Research as a member of technical staff in Special Projects group and began working on a number of projects including Project Natick and Project Peabody.

Spencer painted the Microsoft logo on the Natick Northern Isles datacenter

He is currently working on projects that focus on the use of Small Foundational Models (SFM)s for non-typical data modalities such as telemetry data and power grids.

His most recent completed project is 3D Telemedicine which is based on Holoportation(TM).  He helped move Holoportation from a high-bandwidth studio experience to a  mobile platform running in the back of a car, and from there to the back of a van in Western Africa!  This work focused on live volumetric capture of a patient and transmission of the compressed data anywhere in the world, and utilizes Azure Kinects for 3D capture, NVidia Jetson boards for real-time processing, CUDA-based algorithms for model fusion, Unity applications for RGB rendering, and various networking protocols for image transmission.  The work was open-sourced in December of 2025, and is now available on GitHub (opens in new tab).

In addition, Spencer continues to advise on Project Natick (opens in new tab), and communicate to the public about the benefits of underwater datacenters.  He was the lead engineer for the project and has worked at all levels from day-to-day IT operations, up to system design and subcontractor interfacing.  He even painted the logos on Natick Northern Isles himself!

Spencer holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University. His research foci are generative AI, foundational models, computer vision, sensor integration, and robotics.

.