Contact:Chris Morgan
617-262-2044
morgan@acm.org

Tina Angelone
212-626-0532
angelone@acm.org

IMMEDIATE

New York, November 19, 1998...The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Dr. James N. Gray, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, is the recipient of the 1998 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The award, considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, will be presented on May 15, 1999 during a special awards ceremony hosted by the ACM in Manhattan.

Gray is honored "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation from research prototypes to commercial products."

"Needless to say, I am very honored," Gray said in an e-mail to his colleagues and others. "This is recognition for the work that many of us have done together over the last 30 years. It is great that our work in building easy-to-use database systems that are always up and working correctly is being recognized."

Juris Hartmanis, chair of the 1998 Turing Award Committee, said "I am delighted to see Jim Gray honored with the 1998 Turing Award for his deep, elegant and very practical contributions to database and transaction processing research." Hartmanis is the assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a past Turing Award recipient.

Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. His research at Microsoft focuses on scaleable computing, specifically, building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM, and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems including Rdb and NonStopSQL. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and co-author of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He holds doctorates from Berkeley and Stuttgart, 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.

About the A.M. Turing Award A prize of $25,000 accompanies ACM's most prestigious technical award. It is given to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting technical importance to the computer field. Financial support for the A.M. Turing award is provided by Lucent Technologies, Inc.

About the Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the oldest and largest international association of computer professionals. ACM is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its membership by delivering cutting-edge information and transferring ideas from theory to practice, ACM, with its world-class journals and magazines, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops and forums, is a primary resource to the IT field. For additional information on ACM, visit the web site at http://www.acm.org.