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Jim Gray (computer scientist)

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James Nicholas "Jim" Gray
File:11-23gray.jpg
Born1944 (1944)
DiedJanuary 28, 2007 (2007-01-29), lost at sea
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
AwardsTuring Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsIBM
Tandem Computers
DEC
Microsoft

James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born 1944, lost at sea January 28, 2007) was 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."

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.[citation needed]

Gray pursued his career primarily working as a researcher and software designer at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and DEC. He was a Technical Fellow for Microsoft Research in San Francisco, beginning in 1995.

Work

Gray contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems, including the System R while at IBM, TerraServer-USA and Skyserver for Microsoft. Among his best known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, the "five-minute rule" for allocating storage, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications. He assisted in the development of Virtual Earth.[1][2][3][4] He was also one of the cofounders of the CIDR conference.

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.[5][6][7][8]

However, Gray's boat was equipped with an automatically deployable EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), which should have deployed and begun transmitting the instant his vessel sank. The area around the Farallon Islands where Gray was sailing is also well north of the East-West ship channel used by freighters entering and leaving San Francisco Bay. The weather was clear that day and no ships reported striking his boat, nor were any distress radio transmissions reported.

On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images.[9] The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.

On February 16, 2007, the Friends of Jim Gray Group suspended their search,[10] but continue to follow any important leads. The family ended its search May 31, 2007. The massive high-tech effort did not reveal any new clues.[11][12][13][14][15]

The University of California, Berkeley hosted a tribute to Gray and his life on May 31, 2008. The conference included sessions delivered by Richard Rashid and David Vaskevitch.[16] Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope software is dedicated to Gray. In 2008, Microsoft announced the opening of a research center in Madison, Wisconsin, to be named after Jim Gray.[17]


Books

  • Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (with Andreas Reuter) (1993). ISBN 1558601902.
  • The Benchmark Handbook: For Database and Transaction Processing Systems (1991). Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 9781558601598.

See also

References

  1. ^ An Interview with Jim Gray June 2003, Interviewed by David A. Patterson
  2. ^ Interview with Jim Gray by Marianne Winslett, for ACM SIGMOD Record, March 2003 as part of Distinguished Database Profiles
  3. ^ Interview on MSDN Channel 9, Behind the Code, March 3, 2006
  4. ^ Interview by Mark Whitehorn for The Register 30 May 2006
  5. ^ "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.
  6. ^ "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.
  7. ^ "Search for missing sailor extends to Humboldt". San Francisco Chronicle. January 31, 2007.
  8. ^ "Vast search off coast for data wizard". San Francisco Chronicle. January 31, 2007.
  9. ^ "Silicon Valley's High-Tech Hunt for Colleague". New York Times. February 3, 2007.
  10. ^ "Friends of missing computer scientist suspend search for him". San Francisco Chronicle. February 16, 2007.
  11. ^ Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend, Wired Magazine (August 2007)
  12. ^ Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteer project to help locate Jim Gray
  13. ^ Blog for people trying to locate Jim Gray
  14. ^ Help Find Jim Information to help locate Jim Gray
  15. ^ Print a MISSING Poster Hang a MISSING Poster in Southern California and Mexico.
  16. ^ Jim Gray Tribute website
  17. ^ Database Pioneer Joins Microsoft to Start New Database Research Lab

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