Robert Leroy Mercer

After completing his studies, Mercer worked for 20 years at IBM, where he developed programs for speech recognition and statistical machine translation. In this area, he was one of the pioneers when using statistical and probabilistic methods in computer linguistics, on which today\'s speech recognition and translation programs such as Google translators and Siri are based. The new approach, which is now considered a \"revolutionary\", was to no longer have the programs processed linguistic rules, but to have bilingual files analyzed on a large scale in order to discover patterns and probably derive correct translations from these assessments. Since the company management did not provide the necessary funds because it saw no potential for the future, he and his project partner Peter Brown also took advantage of the Pentagon Authority Darpa in order to continue their research.

In 2011, Steve Bannon won the billionaire Robert Mercer as an investor for the news and opinion website Breitbart News Network.