Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Tribute planned for missing Microsoft engineer

February 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Tribute planned for missing Microsoft engineer

TAGS: Platforms

A tribute to Microsoft engineer Jim Gray, missing at sea for more than a year, is being planned for May 31 at the University, of California, Berkeley.

Three organizations - the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society and UC Berkeley - plan to participate with family and colleagues of Gray. He disappeared without a trace while on a sailing trip to the Farallon Islands, near San Francisco, on January 28, 2007.

Gray is known for work as a programmer, database expert and Microsoft engineer. He helped make possible technologies such as the cash machine, e-commerce, online ticketing and deep databases, according to a press statement on the event. In 1998, Gray received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, considered the most prestigious honor in computer science.

The event is open to the general public, free of charge. Speakers will discuss Gray's accomplishments; technical sessions are planned as well, focusing on the state of computer science. Among the speakers scheduled include Michael Stonebraker, who is a pioneer in object-relational database technology, and Microsoft Architect Pat Helland.

While serving on a panel at a software development conference in 2004, Gray questioned how the software industry could be sustained when software was being given away as part of the open source movement.

Also during his stint at Microsoft, Gray built a Web site called Terra Server, which featured high-resolution satellite imagery before the advent of Google Earth.

Posted by Paul Krill on February 4, 2008 02:14 PM

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