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Jim Gray (computer scientist)

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Jim Gray
Gray in 2006
Born
James Nicholas Gray

(1944-01-12)January 12, 1944[3]
San Francisco, California[2]
DisappearedJanuary 28, 2007 (aged 63)
Waters near San Francisco
StatusDead in absentia, May 16, 2012
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (Ph.D)
OccupationComputer scientist
Employers
Known forWork on database and transaction processing systems
Spouse(s)Loretta (divorced), Donna Carnes (widowed)
Children1 (daughter)
AwardsTuring Award (1998)[1]
Scientific career
Doctoral advisorMichael Harrison[2]

James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born January 12, 1944; lost at sea January 28, 2007; declared deceased May 16, 2012[4]) 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."

Early years

Gray was born in San Francisco, California, the second child of a mother who was a teacher and a father in the U.S. Army; the family moved to Rome where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life, learning to speak Italian before English.[2] The family then moved to Virginia, spending about four years there, until Gray's parents divorced, after which he returned to San Francisco with his mother.[2] His father, an amateur inventor, patented a design for a ribbon cartridge for typewriters that earned him a substantial royalty stream.[2]

After being turned down for the Air Force Academy he entered the University of California, Berkeley as a freshman in 1961, paying $67 per semester.[2] To help pay for college he worked as a co-op for General Dynamics, where he learned to use a Monroe calculator. Discouraged by his chemistry grades, he left Berkeley for six months, returning after an experience in industry he later described as "dreadful."[2] Gray earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966.[citation needed]

After marrying, Gray moved with his wife Loretta to New Jersey, his wife's home state; she got a job as a teacher and he got one at Bell Labs working on a digital simulation that was to be part of Multics. At Bell, he worked three days a week and spent two days as a Master's student at Courant Institute. The couple planned to work for a year, making "enough money so that we could take off five years and go travel around the world."[2] Before commencing their travel plans, they returned to Berkeley for three months. After about two months travelling, they returned again to Berkeley, their interest in travelling satisfied.[2] Gray entered graduate school with Michael Harrison as his advisor. Gray got his Ph.D. in 1969, in programming languages, which was followed by two years of post-doctoral work for IBM.[2]

Research

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 joined Microsoft in 1995 and was a Technical Fellow for the company when he was lost at sea.[3][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Gray contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems. IBM's System R was the precursor of the SQL relational databases that have become a standard throughout the world. For Microsoft, he worked on TerraServer-USA and Skyserver.

Among his best known achievements are

He assisted in the development of Virtual Earth.[14][15][16][17] He was also one of the co-founders of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.

Disappearance

Jim Gray on the Tenacious in January 2006

On Sunday, January 28, 2007, during a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes, Gray and his 40-foot yacht, Tenacious, were reported missing by his wife, Donna Carnes. The Coast Guard searched for four days using a C-130 plane, helicopters, and patrol boats but found no sign of the vessel.[18][19][20][21]

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 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.[22] The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, many theories were put forward on how Gray disappeared.[23]

On February 16, 2007, the family and Friends of Jim Gray Group suspended their search,[24] but continue to follow any important leads. The family ended its underwater search May 31, 2007. Despite much effort and use of high-tech equipment above and below water, searches did not reveal any new clues.[25][26][27][28][29][30]

Personal life

While at Berkeley, Gray and his first wife Loretta had a daughter; the couple later divorced.[2] He is survived by his wife, Donna Carnes, his daughter, three grandchildren, and his sister Gail.

The University of California, Berkeley and Gray's family hosted a tribute to him on May 31, 2008. The conference included sessions delivered by Richard Rashid and David Vaskevitch.[31] Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope software is dedicated to Gray. In 2008, Microsoft opened a research center in Madison, Wisconsin, named after Jim Gray.[32]

Having been missing for five years as of May 16, 2012, Gray is legally assumed to have died at sea.[4][33]

Jim Gray eScience Award

Each year, Microsoft Research presents the Jim Gray eScience Award[34] to a researcher who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of data-intensive computing. Award recipients are selected for their ground-breaking, fundamental contributions to the field of eScience. Previous award winners include Alex Szalay (2007), Carole Goble (2008), Jeff Dozier (2009), Phil Bourne (2010), Mark Abbott (2011), Antony John Williams (2012), and Dr. David Lipman, M.D. (2013).


References

  1. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/602382.602401, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/602382.602401 instead. Jim Gray Turing Award lecture
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Oral History Interview with Jim Gray ([purl.umn.edu/107339 Synopsis] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. 3 January 2002. Retrieved 2010-01-19.
  3. ^ a b "DeWitt Undergraduate CS Scholarship: Dr. James Gray". University of Wisconsin–Madison. Retrieved 2010-01-18.
  4. ^ a b Greengard, Samuel (June 2012). Vardi, Moshe (ed.). "Jim Gray Declared Dead". Communications of the ACM. 55 (7). ACM Media: 19. ISSN 0001-0782.
  5. ^ Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (with Andreas Reuter) (1993). ISBN 1-55860-190-2.
  6. ^ The Benchmark Handbook: For Database and Transaction Processing Systems (1991). Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-55860-159-8.
  7. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1379387.1379409, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1379387.1379409 instead.
  8. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1965724.1965744, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1965724.1965744 instead.
  9. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1400214.1400216, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1400214.1400216 instead.
  10. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1400214.1400231, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1400214.1400231 instead.
  11. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1400214.1400233, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1400214.1400233 instead.
  12. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1400214.1400230, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1400214.1400230 instead.
  13. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/360363.360369, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/360363.360369 instead.
  14. ^ An Interview with Jim Gray June 2003, Interviewed by David A. Patterson
  15. ^ Interview with Jim Gray by Marianne Winslett, for ACM SIGMOD Record, March 2003 as part of Distinguished Database Profiles
  16. ^ Interview on MSDN Channel 9, Behind the Code, March 3, 2006
  17. ^ Interview by Mark Whitehorn for The Register 30 May 2006
  18. ^ "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.
  19. ^ Doyle, Jim (January 30, 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.
  20. ^ Schevitz, Tanya; Rubenstein, Steve (January 31, 2007). "Search for missing sailor extends to Humboldt". San Francisco Chronicle.
  21. ^ May, Meredith; Doyle, Jim (January 31, 2007). "Vast search off coast for data wizard". San Francisco Chronicle.
  22. ^ Hafner, Katie (February 3, 2007). "Silicon Valley's High-Tech Hunt for Colleague". New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  23. ^ Doyle, Jim (February 3, 2007). "FARALLON ISLANDS / Missing sailor mystery / Boaters' speculations range from orcas to margarita escape". www.sfgate.com. Retrieved 19 October 2012.
  24. ^ "Friends of missing computer scientist suspend search for him". San Francisco Chronicle. February 16, 2007.
  25. ^ Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend, Wired Magazine (August 2007)
  26. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/1965724.1965744, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/1965724.1965744 instead.
  27. ^ Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteer project to help locate Jim Gray
  28. ^ Blog for people trying to locate Jim Gray
  29. ^ Help Find Jim Information to help locate Jim Gray
  30. ^ Print a MISSING Poster Hang a MISSING Poster in Southern California and Mexico.
  31. ^ Jim Gray Tribute website from the University of California, Berkeley
  32. ^ Database Pioneer Joins Microsoft to Start New Database Research Lab, an April 2008 press release from Microsoft
  33. ^ Wingfield, Nick (May 18, 2012). "Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist". The New York Times. Retrieved May 18, 2012.
  34. ^ Jim Gray eScience Award

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