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Michael Burrows (computer scientist)

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This article is about the computer scientist. For the Church of Ireland (Anglican) bishop, see Michael Burrows (bishop).
Michael Burrows
Born1963 (age 61–62)[citation needed]
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Alma materUniversity College London (BSc)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known forBurrows–Wheeler transform[4][5]
AwardsFellow of the Royal Society (2013)[1]
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsGoogle
University of Cambridge
Digital Equipment Corporation
AltaVista
Microsoft
ThesisEfficient Data Sharing (1988)
Doctoral advisorDavid Wheeler[2][3]
Websiteresearch.google.com/pubs/author24014.html

Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform currently working for Google. Born in Britain, he now[when?] lives in the United States, although remaining a British citizen. [6][7][8]

Education

Burrows studied Electronic Engineering with Computer Science at University College London and then completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge supervised by David Wheeler.[2] [9][10]

Career

Upon leaving Cambridge, he worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista.[11]

Following Compaq's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft preventing spamming.[10][12] Shortly thereafter he went to Google.[13]

After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched microkernels[citation needed] and basic matters of security, he went on to enlarge upon that work as systems were deployed at large scale on the Internet.

During his employment at Google, Burrows has studied concurrency and synchronisation, and for programming in the large[clarification needed] – especially with respect to the C++ language.[citation needed]

Awards and honors

Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013.[10] His nomination reads:

Dr Michael Burrows is distinguished for his pioneering work on web search and indexing. He was one of the designers of the early search engine Altavista. He was also one of the pioneers of the application of formal logic to the verification of security protocols. He has made seminal contributions to many other areas of computer science and engineering ranging from compression through synchronization to performance measurement. He is one of the engineers who led the design of Google's distributed computing infrastructure.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b Anon (2013). "Dr Michael Burrows FRS". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-23. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)
  2. ^ a b c Burrows, Michael (1988). Efficient Data Sharing (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
  3. ^ Michael Burrows at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ Burrows, Michael; Wheeler, David J. (1994), A block sorting lossless data compression algorithm, Technical Report 124, Digital Equipment Corporation
  5. ^ Salson, M.; Lecroq, T.; Léonard, M.; Mouchard, L. (2009). "A four-stage algorithm for updating a Burrows–Wheeler transform". Theoretical Computer Science. 410 (43): 4350. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2009.07.016.
  6. ^ Michael Burrows at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  7. ^ Savage, S.; Burrows, M.; Nelson, G.; Sobalvarro, P.; Anderson, T. (1997). "Eraser: A dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 15 (4): 391. doi:10.1145/265924.265927.
  8. ^ Abadi, M. N.; Burrows, M.; Lampson, B.; Plotkin, G. (1993). "A calculus for access control in distributed systems" (PDF). ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 15 (4): 706. doi:10.1145/155183.155225.
  9. ^ Burrows, M.; Abadi, M.; Needham, R. M. (1989). "A Logic of Authentication". Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 426 (1871): 233. Bibcode:1989RSPSA.426..233B. doi:10.1098/rspa.1989.0125.
  10. ^ a b c BURROWS. "BURROWS, Dr. Michael". Who's Who. Vol. 2017 (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Unknown parameter |othernames= ignored (help) (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) (subscription required)
  11. ^ "1996 Dvorak Awards Winners". citivu.com. [dead link]
  12. ^ "Michael Burrows". angreiter.com.
  13. ^ Lu, Crystal (January 12, 2007). "The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley". The Cardinal Inquirer. Archived from the original on 2008-02-17. Retrieved 2008-07-01. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
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