Microsoft researcher to discuss online observatory in CITI lecture

Microsoft researcher to discuss online observatory in CITI
lecture
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The first CITI
distinguished lecture of 2003 is set for Feb. 5 and will
feature Microsoft researcher Jim Gray presenting “Online
Science: The Worldwide Telescope as a Prototype for Computational
Science.”

In his lecture
abstract, Gray wrote, “Computational science has historically
meant simulation, but there is an increasing role for analysis
and mining of online scientific data. As a case in point,
half of the world’s astronomy data is public. The astronomy
community is putting all that data on the Internet so that
the Internet becomes the world’s best telescope: It
has the whole sky, in many spectra and in detail as good
as the best two-year-old telescopes. It is usable by all
astronomers everywhere. This is the vision of the virtual
observatory — also called the World Wide Telescope
(WWT).”

In creating this
online observatory, Gray has been working with the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey, a multinational collaboration of research
institutions and governments created to collect detail on
the northern sky, and California Institute of Technology
to federate their data in Web services on the Internet and
to make it easy to ask questions of the database, <http://skyserver.sdss.org>.

In his talk,
Gray will explain the rationale for the WWT and describe
some of the computer science challenges of publishing, federating
and mining scientific data.

Gray is a distinguished
engineer in Microsoft’s Scalable Servers Research Group
and manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center.
He was one of the developers of Microsoft’s TerraServer,
one of the world’s largest online databases, providing
free public access to a vast data store of maps and aerial
photographs of the United States.

His primary research
interests are in databases and transaction processing systems.
His current work focuses on building supercomputers with
commodity components, thereby reducing the cost of storage,
processing and networking. This includes work on building
fast networks, on building huge Web servers and building
very inexpensive and very high-performance storage servers.

Gray is active
in the research community, is a member of the National Academy
of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
and recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery’s
Turing Award, its most prestigious award, for his work on
transaction processing.

The lecture will
be held in McMurtry Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan
Hall at 4 p.m. A reception in Martel Hall will follow the
talk.