Jim Gray (computer scientist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Born | 1944 |
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| Field | Computer Science |
| Institution | IBM Tandem Computers DEC Microsoft |
| Notable prizes | Turing Award |
James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born 1944, presumed lost at sea January 28, 2007) is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."
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[edit] Biography
Gray studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1969. He was the first recipient of a Ph.D. from Berkeley's Computer Science Department.
Gray worked as an industrial researcher and software designer at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and DEC. He has been a Technical Fellow for Microsoft Research in San Francisco since 1995. Gray has contributed to the building of several major database and transaction processing systems, including the groundbreaking System R while at IBM, Terraserver, and Skyserver for Microsoft, as well as an extensive record of publication in academic journals. Among his more well known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications. He also helped in the development of Virtual Earth.
[edit] Disappearance at sea and search
During a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes, his 40-foot yacht, Tenacious, was reported missing on Sunday, January 28, 2007. The Coast Guard searched for four days using a C-130 plane, helicopters, and patrol boats but found no sign of the vessel.[1][2][3][4][5]
On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images.[6] The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.[7]
On February 16, the Friends of Jim Gray Group suspended their search,[8] but continue to follow any important leads. The family is still actively searching[citation needed]. The San Jose Mercury News reported[9] that a veteran deputy of the Coast Guard described the continued search as "the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen." The massive high-tech effort did not reveal any new clues.
[edit] References
- ^ "Coast Guard searches for missing SF boater: 63-year-old man failed to return from trip to Farallon Islands", San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2007.
- ^ "Sea search for missing Microsoft scientist: No sign of S.F. man who set out alone for Farallon Islands in 40-foot sailboat", San Francisco Chronicle, January 30, 2007.
- ^ "Possible sighting of missing engineer's boat fails to pan out Coast Guard Expands Search From Monterey Bay To Oregon", San Jose Mercury, January 30, 2007.
- ^ "Search for missing sailor extends to Humboldt", San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 2007.
- ^ "Vast search off coast for data wizard", San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 2007.
- ^ "Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Hunt for Colleague", New York Times, February 3, 2007.
- ^ "Friends turn to satellite, spy plane in search for missing Microsoft engineer", San Jose Mercury News, February 2, 2007.
- ^ "Friends of missing computer scientist suspend search for him", San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 2007.
- ^ Khánh, Truong Phuoc. "Search for pioneering computer scientist called off - Massive High-Tech Effort By 'Friends Of Jim' Reveals No Fresh Clues", San Jose Mercury News, February 19, 2007. Retrieved on February 20, 2007.
[edit] External links
- Gray's Microsoft Research home page
- An Interview with Jim Gray June 2003, Interviewed by David A. Patterson
- Interview with Jim Gray by Marianne Winslett, for ACM SIGMOD Record, March 2003 as part of Distinguished Database Profiles
- Interview on MSDN Channel 9, Behind the Code
- Video Behind the Code on ResearchChannel
- Interview by Mark Whitehorn for The Register
[edit] Search effort
- Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteer project to help locate Jim Gray
- Blog for people trying to locate Jim Gray
- Help Find Jim Information to help locate Jim Gray
- Print a MISSING Poster Hang a MISSING Poster in Southern California and Mexico.
1966: Perlis • 67: Wilkes • 68: Hamming • 69: Minsky
1970: Wilkinson • 71: McCarthy • 72: Dijkstra • 73: Bachman • 74: Knuth • 75: Newell, Simon • 76: Rabin, Scott • 77: Backus • 78: Floyd • 79: Iverson
1980: Hoare • 81: Codd • 82: Cook • 83: Thompson, Ritchie • 84: Wirth • 85: Karp • 86: Hopcroft, Tarjan • 87: Cocke • 88: Sutherland • 89: Kahan
1990: Corbató • 91: Milner • 92: Lampson • 93: Hartmanis, Stearns • 94: Feigenbaum, Reddy • 95: Blum • 96: Pnueli • 97: Engelbart • 98: Gray • 99: Brooks
2000: Yao • 01: Dahl, Nygaard • 02: Rivest, Shamir, Adleman • 03: Kay • 04: Cerf, Kahn • 05: Naur • 06: Allen
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since March 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1944 births | Computer scientists | Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery | IBM employees | Members and associates of the United States National Academy of Sciences | Microsoft employees | People lost at sea | Possibly living people | Turing Award laureates
