Jim Gray (computer scientist)

James Nicholas Gray (1944 – declared dead in absentia 2012) 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".[4]

Jim Gray
Gray in 2006
Born
James Nicholas Gray

(1944-01-12)January 12, 1944[1]
San Francisco, California[2]
DisappearedJanuary 28, 2007
Waters near San Francisco
StatusDeclared dead in absentia
January 28, 2012(2012-01-28) (aged 68)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.)
OccupationComputer scientist
Employer
Known forWork on database and transaction processing systems
Spouse(s)Loretta (divorced), Donna Carnes (widowed)
Children1 (daughter)
AwardsTuring Award (1998)[3]
IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award (1998)

Early years and personal life

Gray was born in San Francisco, the second child of Ann Emma Sanbrailo, a teacher, and James Able Gray, who was in the U.S. Army; the family moved to Rome, Italy, where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life; he learned to speak Italian before English. 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. 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. 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.[5]

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 New York University's Courant Institute. After a year they traveled for several months before settling again in Berkeley, where Gray entered graduate school with Michael A. Harrison as his advisor. In 1969 he received his Ph.D. in programming languages, then did two years of postdoctoral work for IBM.[2]

While at Berkeley, Gray and Loretta had a daughter; they were later divorced. His second wife was Donna Carnes.

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[lower-alpha 1] until he was lost at sea in 2007.[14]

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.

His best-known achievements include:

He assisted in developing Virtual Earth.[16][17][18] He was also one of the co-founders of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.

Disappearance
Jim Gray on his yacht Tenacious in 2006

Gray, an experienced sailor, owned a 40-foot sailboat. On January 28, 2007, he failed to return from a short solo trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes.[19] The weather was clear, and no distress call was received, nor was any signal detected from the boat's automatic Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon.

A four-day Coast Guard search using planes, helicopters, and boats found nothing.[20][21][22][23] On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area[24] and the thousands of images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Students, colleagues, and friends of Gray, and computer scientists around the world formed a "Jim Gray Group" to study these images for clues. On February 16 this search was suspended,[25] and an underwater search using sophisticated equipment ended May 31.[9][26][27][28][29][30]

The University of California, Berkeley and Gray's family hosted a tribute on May 31, 2008.[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] On January 28, 2012, Gray was declared legally dead.[33][34]

Jim Gray eScience Award

Each year, Microsoft Research presents the Jim Gray eScience Award to a researcher who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of data-intensive computing.[35] 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).

gollark: Sine waves do not HAVE harmonics, bee.
gollark: NOT real.
gollark: It's just differential equations.
gollark: Just learn all circuit analysis.
gollark: Add infinitely many.

See also

Notes
  1. See [1][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

References
  1. "DeWitt Undergraduate CS Scholarship: Dr. James Gray". University of Wisconsin–Madison. Archived from the original on 2010-02-23. Retrieved 2010-01-18.
  2. 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. Gray, J. (2003). "What next?: A dozen information-technology research goals" (PDF). Journal of the ACM. 50: 41–57. arXiv:cs/9911005. doi:10.1145/602382.602401. Jim Gray Turing Award lecture
  4. Gray, Jim (1998). "Jim Gray - A.M. Turing Award Winner". ACM.
  5. "Biography of Dr. Jim Gray". faircom.com. Archived from the original on 3 July 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  6. Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (with Andreas Reuter) (1993). ISBN 1-55860-190-2.
  7. The Benchmark Handbook: For Database and Transaction Processing Systems (1991). Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-55860-159-8.
  8. Saade, E. (2008). "Search survey for S/V Tenacious". ACM SIGMOD Record. 37 (2): 70. doi:10.1145/1379387.1379409.
  9. Hellerstein, J. M.; Tennenhouse, D. L. (2011). "Searching for Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 54 (7): 77. doi:10.1145/1965724.1965744.
  10. Crawford, D. (2008). "Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 7. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400216.
  11. Szalay, A. S. (2008). "Jim Gray, astronomer". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 58. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400231.
  12. Gray, J. (2008). "Technical perspectiveThe Polaris Tableau system". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 74. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400233.
  13. Stonebraker, M.; Dewitt, D. J. (2008). "A tribute to Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 54. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400230.
  14. Steve Silberman (24 Jul 2007). "Inside the High Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend". Wired. Retrieved 3 Feb 2015.
  15. Eswaran, K. P.; Gray, J. N.; Lorie, R. A.; Traiger, I. L. (1976). "The notions of consistency and predicate locks in a database system". Communications of the ACM. 19 (11): 624–633. doi:10.1145/360363.360369.
  16. Winslett, Marianne. "Interview with Jim Gray for ACM SIGMOD Record, March 2003 as part of Distinguished Database Profiles" (PDF). sigmod.org.
  17. Interview on MSDN Channel 9, Behind the Code, March 3, 2006
  18. "Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray". regdeveloper.co.uk.
  19. Bell, Gordon; Lamport, Leslie; Lampson, Butler W. (2013). "James N. Gray". Biographical Memoirs. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.369.4753.
  20. "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.
  21. 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.
  22. Schevitz, Tanya; Rubenstein, Steve (January 31, 2007). "Search for missing sailor extends to Humboldt". San Francisco Chronicle.
  23. May, Meredith; Doyle, Jim (January 31, 2007). "Vast search off coast for data wizard". San Francisco Chronicle.
  24. Hafner, Katie (February 3, 2007). "Silicon Valley's High-Tech Hunt for Colleague". New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  25. "Friends of missing computer scientist suspend search for him". San Francisco Chronicle. February 16, 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-03-05.
  26. Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend, Wired Magazine (August 2007)
  27. "Amazon Mechanical Turk - All HITs". mturk.com. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  28. "Tenacious Search". openphi.net. Archived from the original on 3 July 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  29. Help Find Jim Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine Information to help locate Jim Gray
  30. Print a MISSING Poster Archived 2012-11-16 at the Wayback Machine Hang a MISSING Poster in Southern California and Mexico.
  31. root (16 February 2016). "Industry".
  32. "Database Pioneer Joins Microsoft to Start New Database Research Lab | Stories". Stories. 2008-04-23. Retrieved 2018-07-19.
  33. Greengard, Samuel (June 2012). Vardi, Moshe (ed.). "Jim Gray Declared Dead". Communications of the ACM. 55 (7): 19. doi:10.1145/2209249.2209257. ISSN 0001-0782.
  34. Wingfield, Nick (May 18, 2012). "Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist". The New York Times. Retrieved May 18, 2012.
  35. "Jim Gray eScience Award - Microsoft Research". microsoft.com. Microsoft. Retrieved 2 July 2015.

(Proceedings) May 31, 2008

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