The U.S. Coast Guard has been conducting an extensive search for 63-year-old Jim Gray, a senior manager with Microsoft"s Silicon Valley research organization. Gray"s wife reported him missing Sunday afternoon when he failed to return to their home in San Francisco from his sailboating trip. The Coast Guard is continuing to search 4,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and the Farallon Islands, where Gray was reportedly headed in his 40-foot sailboat Tenacious Sunday morning. The Coast Guard said it has deployed a C-130 fixed-wing aircraft, an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter, three 87-foot coastal patrol boats and other equipment to continue the search.
Gray was hired in 1995 to run Microsoft"s Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco. According to a biography of Gray on a Microsoft Web site, he researches databases and transaction processing systems with a particular focus on using computers to make scientists more productive in the fields of astronomy, geography, hydrology, oceanography, biology, and health care. Gray, who has also worked at such technology companies as IBM, Tandem Computers, and Digital Equipment, won the ACM Turing Award in 1998 for his work on transaction processing.