Remembering The Search For Jim Gray, A Year Later
It's been more than a year since Jim Gray went missing Jan. 28 on a solitary sail from San Francisco Bay to the Farallon Islands.
No sign of him was ever found. But if he is gone, he is far from forgotten. Three organizations, the IEEE Computing Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, and University of California at Berkeley, are planning a joint tribute to him May 31 at Berkeley. It was the ACM that awarded Gray the A. M. Turing Award in 1998, the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in computing, which now carries a $250,000 award. Members from all three organizations were engaged a year ago in an innovative search for a boat missing at sea, scanning thousands of panels of recent satellite data and plotting wind/drift patterns over a wide swath of ocean. The image reviewers were able to spot several candidate boats out on the Pacific, but on-the-scene inspection eliminated them as being Gray's missing 40-foot, red-hulled Tenacious.
