Photo Credit: Courtesy Donna Carnes-Gray

ATMs, online ticketing and e-commerce. His database research paved the way for deep databases like Google. Through his eight years at Berkeley Engineering and his longtime research and design career at Bell Labs, IBM, Tandem Computers, Digital Equipment Corporation and Microsoft, he made a lasting contribution to both the academics and industry of computing.

He is Jim Gray (B.S.’66 Eng Math, Ph.D.’69 CS), who earned the university’s first doctorate in computer science and went on in 1998 to earn the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing. A seasoned seaman, Gray disappeared without a trace on a solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands on January 28, 2007.

Friends and colleagues will celebrate Gray and his career contributions on May 31 at 9:00 a.m. in Zellerbach Hall, followed by technical sessions in Wheeler Auditorium. The event is cosponsored by UC Berkeley, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society.

To register, go to www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/JimGrayTribute. Please check the website before the event, as hall assignments are subject to change.