On a Wednesday in May in a courtroom in San Francisco, Jim Gray, a legendary figure in the technology industry, was declared legally dead. Few in Madison likely noticed, but maybe they should have, for part of Gray?s considerable legacy exists here. It was in 2004 that Gray, a Microsoft scientist and world-renowned database expert ? recipient of the Turing Award, his field?s highest honor ? first suggested to his friend David DeWitt, a celebrated UW-Madison computer science professor, that Microsoft and UW should collaborate on a Microsoft lab in Madison that DeWitt would run.
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