Jim Gray Public Service (Back to Jim's home page)

Publication Boards

• Computer science online Research Repository (CoRR), Moderator of Database Section
• ACM Queue, Editorial Board.
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Editorial Board
• Morgan Kaufmann Data Management Series, Editor

Advisory Boards

• Ordinal Corporation, (they sort fast), Board Member
• National Library of Medicine (Regent)

Program Committees

• CIDR 2007 and HPTS 2007 local arrangements
• ACM Turning Award Committee
• ACM 2007 Federated Research Conferences Plenary speaker chair

Societies

• Association of Computing Machinery, Fellow
• National Academy of Engineering, Member, (Computer Science Section Chair)
• National Academy of Science, Member,  (Membership Committee) 
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member
• European Academy of Sciences, Member

Emeritus

• VLDB Journal, Editor in Chief and Endowment Board
• National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
• National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (2001).
• Stanford University School of Engineering, Advisory Board Member

· Presidential Advisory Committee on Information Technology The committee's web site is http://www.nitrd.gov/pitac/ and the final report is at http://www.nitrd.gov/pitac/report/. Here is an MSword version of the report.  This committee has stakeholders from everywhere in the IT industry (telcos, industry, academe, citizens, government, ...), 27 people in all.

They observe that:

• 1/3 of the US economic growth since 1992 has been in the Information Technology sector. IT is key to our health, wealth, and safety.
• US Government research funding of twenty years ago, created this boom.
• Federal IT research funding for the last decade has been flat (in constant dollars).

The committee recommended:

• Increase long-term research funding in 3-areas:
• Software design and implementation technologies: in particular LONG RANGE research in these areas.
• Technologies to scale the Next Generation Internet to 6 billion users.
• Tools, algorithms, and systems for high-performance computing.
• Over the next 5 years, ramp up Federal research support an additional 1.4B$/y for Lewis and Clark style "expeditions" into cyberspace.

The report is very dull reading (a 5 page executive summary makes 35 recommendations!). But, it is important for the wide IT community to appreciate that this is the best we are going to get from a committee. There is much good hiding in the report. I encourage you to look at it (at least the executive summary .

A narrower but related work is the Asilomar Report on Database Research. Fifteen DB researchers got together for a 3-day retreat to think about how we do DB research and how we should do it in the future. The paper is short and an easy read. Here is the HTML (34KB) and MSword(66KB). This was updated by the Lowell Database Research Community Self Assessment in Spring of 2003. That report and the supporting presentations are at