Citation
(1999), "ACM Turing Award", Kybernetes, Vol. 28 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1999.06728iab.004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 1999, MCB UP Limited
ACM Turing Award
The prestigious Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Award has been presented to Jim Gray of Microsoft Research. The award was made in May 1999. At a ceremony in New York City the 1998 ACM A.M. Turing Award was presented to James N. Gray.
The details of the award were reported in a supplement to the Communications of the ACM, June 1999, Vol. 42 No. 6. It stated that Gray was honoured for his:
seminal contributions to database and transactional processing and his technical leadership in system implementation. The transaction is the fundamental abstraction underlying database system concurrency control and failure recovery. Gray’s work led to the definition of the desired key transaction properties: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability. His work on locking and recovery demonstrated how to build database systems that automatically provide these properties. His fault tolerance work explained how to use transactions to achieve high system availability.
Recipient's background:
Gray is presently a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in San Francisco, CA and is Manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). His research focuses on scalable computing and fault tolerant, parallel, and distributed database systems. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1995, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM, and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems.
Gray received a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and an honorary doctorate from the University of Stuttgart. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Trustee of the VLDB Foundation, and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management. Author of numerous articles throughout his career, Gray also frequently lectures at universities.
Gray is a member of the Presidential Advisory/Committee on Information Technology. This 25-member group recently submitted a final report to President Clinton and the Congress about how to help the USA maintain its leadership in information technology.