Microsoft engineer James Gray, 63 missing at Sea - 1/28/07 - Calif. Presumed dead/legally

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Satellite searches for missing Microsoft engineer

Asher Moses
February 5, 2007 - 1:28PM

The disappearance of a renowned computer scientist has sparked a massive online manhunt, with thousands of volunteers poring over satellite images in search of clues.

James Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher and winner of the prestigious Turing Award, failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday, January 28.

He left from San Francisco Bay aboard a 40-foot sailing boat, and had intended to scatter his mother's ashes at the nearby Farallon Islands.

Several days of intensive searching by the US Coast Guard and private planes revealed no sign of Dr Gray or his boat, so desperate friends and colleagues turned to the internet for help.

On Friday, engineers from NASA, online retailer Amazon and technology companies such as Google and Microsoft organised a satellite and high-altitude aircraft to photograph the area where he was believed to be located.

The photographs were then split into smaller tiles and uploaded to Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, allowing virtually anyone to take part in the search effort.

"We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim's boat in any of these images," Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, wrote in his blog late on Friday.

"The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view."

On Sunday, Mr Vogels updated his blog with news that almost 100,000 tiles had been reviewed, a number of which the online volunteers had marked for further inspection.
>>>>>>Full Article
http://tinyurl.com/3727fe

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Search for missing Microsoft engineer extends to Mexico

The search for Jim Gray, the missing Microsoft engineer, was extended to Mexico on Wednesday, said Mike Olson, an Oracle vice president and a spokesman for the private search effort. Olson said U.S. Coast Guard and Mexican officials have been notified. Weather permitting, private planes will search the Pacific Coast of Baja California and further south.

Mexican officials are also notifying Mexican marinas and posters of Gray and his 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious, are being distributed south of the border. Gray has not been heard from since Jan. 28 when he told family members he was headed toward the Farallon Islands to scatter his mother's ashes. No debris or emergency signal has been detected.

Like the California search, the expanded search into Mexico will use analysis of digital photographs taken from space, Olson said. To date, more than 6,000 volunteers are participating in the analysis of the nearly 100,000 images.

>>>>>>Full Article
http://tinyurl.com/25bouw

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Feb 16, 2007 7:41 pm US/Pacific
Friends Of Missing S.F. Scientist Call Off Search

(BCN) SAN FRANCISCO Friends of a renowned computer scientist who disappeared off the California coast said Friday they were suspending their search for him and his sailboat.

The Coast Guard, San Francisco police and colleagues of Jim Gray, 63, had been searching for the Microsoft engineer and his 40-foot-yacht, Tenacious, since Jan. 28.

Gray, acclaimed for his pioneering research on databases, set out from San Francisco late last month to scatter his mother's ashes around the Farallon Islands, about 25 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Gray's friends and colleagues had used satellite imagery, collected wind and current data and arranged for searches from Oregon to Mexico's Baja California coast. They also walked the coastline and distributed posters of Jim and his boat, but didn't find any clues to his whereabouts.

"The active search has been discontinued due to exhausting all present leads and the lack of new information," friend Mike Olson said in a statement. "Of course, should we or the Coast Guard receive any new information, we will investigate it."

The Coast Guard scoured 132,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, looking as far south as the Channel Islands over four days without finding a trace of Gray or his boat.

Last week, Gray's colleagues expanded their search for him to waters off Mexico, nearly a week after the Coast Guard called off its own search.
http://cbs5.com/local/local_story_047201639.html

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clock Feb 19, 2007 6:55 am US/Pacific
Body Found On Marin Coast Not Missing Sailor

(BCN) POINT DIABLO The U.S. Coast Guard reports a body was recovered in the water in the vicinity of Point Diablo on Friday, but it is not the body of missing San Francisco man Jim Gray.

According to the Coast Guard, the body was pulled from the water by a Presidio Fire Department boat at around 7:10 p.m. Friday.

Coast Guard officials report the body was delivered to the Coast Guard Golden Gate station and was then transferred to the Marin County Coroner's Office, where it was confirmed the body was not that of Gray.
>>>>>>Complete Article
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_050095950.html

Speculations about what became of Gray, who went missing Jan. 28, abound, according to a Coast Guard dispatcher.

[klaasend]

This is such an odd sad case.

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Friends to carry on missing sailor's research
Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Computer database wizard Jim Gray woke up Jan. 28, 2007, at his home on Telegraph Hill, surveyed the calm, sunny skies, and decided it was the perfect day to scatter his mother's ashes at sea.

Gray, 63, embarked from Gashouse Cove in San Francisco in his 40-foot sailboat, named Tenacious, and headed solo for the Farallon Islands.

He hasn't been seen since.

The mystery surrounding Gray's disappearance has never been solved, but almost 1,000 of his friends and colleagues - including some titans in the technology world - gathered in Berkeley Saturday to keep his memory alive and forge ahead with his research.

"He was a mountain of a person, and our community misses him immeasurably," said Michael Stonebreaker, professor emeritus of computer science at UC Berkeley, at a tribute to Gray held on the Cal campus Saturday. "He was a giant, interested in everything. He epitomized what it means to be a scholar."

Gray pioneered database technology in the 1970s, and was among the first to develop the technology used in computerized transactions. He discovered ways to ensure transactions, such as moving money from one account to another, would complete even if a computer crashed, and that transactions could happen sequentially, for example allowing a husband and wife to each deposit money into a joint account from separate computers.

His work is now used in nearly all Internet retail sales, by banks and credit card companies and for airline reservations. His later work on database technology has been used by oceanographers, geologists, astronomers and the general public to map the Earth via Google Earth and TerraServer.

"No matter who I asked, everyone always thought Jim Gray was smarter than they were," said David Vaskevitch, a vice president at Microsoft who spoke at Gray's tribute. "That's saying a lot in a field that has a whole lot of smart people."

Gray's greatest contribution was not his research, but his warm, open-hearted personality, his friends said. Gray was a mentor to hundreds of computer scientists and brought together researchers from dozens of competing companies and fields.

"Jimi Hendrix once said that knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. Jim Gray listened," said Pat Helland, a researcher at Microsoft, where Gray worked for many years. "He always, always listened."

Gray was an experienced sailor and often took his colleagues for spins around San Francisco Bay. On the Sunday he vanished, he made a few calls on his cell phone and checked his e-mail before sailing out of cell phone range, somewhere between the Golden Gate and the Farallons.

When he didn't return that evening, his wife called the U.S. Coast Guard, and his extensive network of friends, who used their technological expertise to comb the waters for their colleague.

"If you're going to go missing, you want to be Jim Gray," said Michael Olson, a former vice president at Oracle who led the volunteer search efforts. "He knew everybody. But the ocean is enormous and unforgiving."

Gray's friends at NASA moved several satellites over the Golden Gate to scan the ocean for signs of his boat. Volunteers scattered along the coast putting up posters and looking for telltale debris. The U.S. Coast Guard searched 132,000 square miles of the Pacific.

But after three weeks, nothing was found. No boat, no wreckage, no sign of Gray. One theory is that a shipping container, floating just below the surface, ripped a hole in the boat's fiberglass hull and the boat sank.

In autumn, Gray's wife, Donna Carnes, and a few of their friends decided to hold a tribute to Gray, careful not to use the words "memorial" or "funeral." After a few speeches on Gray's contributions to technology, the crowd gathered for a six-hour conference advancing his research.

UC Berkeley also announced that Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and other technology giants chipped in to endow a chair in Gray's honor in the computer science department, where Gray received his undergraduate and graduate degrees.

"Everyone's sad about the reason we're here, but it's actually wonderful to see everyone," Olson said. "Jim brought us all together."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/31/BAD21117FT.DTL

[MuffyBee]

Jim Gray has not been found.  Here are some articles about him and about the search.


WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 15.08
Tech Biz  :  People   RSS
Inside the High Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend
Steve Silberman Email 07.24.07
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-08/ff_jimgray?currentPage=all

Jim Gray Summary Home Page
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/

Jim Gray (computer scientist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/closure-in-disappearance-of-computer-scientist-jim-gray/?_r=0

Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist
By NICK WINGFIELD  MAY 18, 2012 7:08 AM
 
Jim Gray, a computer scientist then working for Microsoft, vanished with his sailboat somewhere in the waters beyond the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Because no trace of Dr. Gray or his boat, Tenacious, was found during the extensive searches that followed, he could not be declared legally dead.
That changed on Wednesday when a court in San Francisco granted a petition by Donna Carnes, Dr. Gray’s widow, to establish her husband’s death under California law, which allows for such a determination when a missing person has not been heard from for five continuous years. Dr. Gray is now considered missing but presumed dead.